Coding Blocks - 2023 Holiday Season Developer Shopping List

Episode Date: November 25, 2023

It’s that time of year again when the three of us reflect on the things we’ve bought and loved, or the things we want to get…and want to love…So, come join us in this episode for our usual amount of fun while seeing if there’s anything that might make your shopping list! A small note […]

all right let's do this thing all right well let's do it then what are we talking about this is uh yeah subscribe what are we talking about this is the year 2023 in the episode no no but you have episode 223 but why is it why who titled the show notes 2024 um me because uh that's why i wrote down on my little list here i'm fixing it as we scroll scroll scroll so amazing nothing to see here 2023 i get a little ahead of myself i gotta credit that's right i think the black friday used by the episode number ish episode yeah pretty amazing this is the christmas episode so hey in all fairness we did mess up and we forgot to record the the black friday episode on time deadlines y'all deadlines deadlines but this

should be out for cyber monday right so so emphasis on should should and most of these deals are probably going to be live and maybe even better than what we have in here and they should like have you guys noticed that that all these deals seem to start up two weeks before black friday now and they just go on through january or something like that it's sort of ridiculous well i mean now it seems like black friday sales start on november 1st and just continue on yeah so you know hopefully whatever we do in this show will actually be there and we'll probably be there for the next month between now and christmas so you know while supplies last yeah while supplies last we might be a week late and a dollar short but we're gonna do our best here so for those that have not been a part of

this in the past we we try to do an episode every so for those that have not been a part of this in the past we we try to do an episode every year where we talk about the things that us as developers we like and and us personally is things that we like and you know have fun with it so with that i'm alan underwood i'm joseph and i'm neither man oh wait hey hey that's outlaw and you know you subscribe to us on itunes spotify stitcher more and you should visit codyblocks.net send feedback questions rants to comments to codyblocks that you should follow us on x or twitter at codyblocks and i think that's it i think we have social links at the top of our CodyBlocks.net webpage. All right, done. Were you twitching?

Were you like, if I don't get this out, I'm not going to survive? I can't do it. The past 10 episodes, you've been counting it. It's like, Outlaw's messed up the last 10. If he doesn't love it, I will lose my mind. Yeah, man. I couldn't take it. All right. So now now we got to get into

probably the best part of the show and this is where outlaw reads off our itunes or our reviewers and unfortunately this one looks pretty easy so yeah i'm not really sure um yeah on the itunes i was like maybe not not. So I'm going to say, I'm going to say Tux, Tuxcon. That's fine. And on Spotify, we have, and these are apologies in advance. One of these for sure. And you can guess which one you think I messed up the most. From Spotify, thank you to Frederick,

Volkmar, and OrbWizard. Hey, I'm impressed, man. Very nice. I don't think you missed any of them. Okay, well, Frederick, you let him know that I messed that up, and I apologize. Yeah, very good.

All right, great. And hey, if Codingham's coming up, just got to mention that, February 24th. And we're looking for speakers up until December 15th. It's a great chance to do a talk, your first talk, your millionth talk, or whatever in between, do it. Yeah. And I think that Joe said coding camp. I think that's what he said.

It should be Orlando Code Camp. Code Camp. He usually, like, sometimes Joe just comes in and like, Listen, it doesn't matter. coding camp i think that's what he said should be our linda code camp code camp he usually like sometimes joe just comes in like listen it doesn't matter go to orlando coding camp in 2025 and it's going to be amazing you have until december december of 2024 to submit your thing that's right that's right so yes yeah definitely go sign up for the thing joe aren't you glad to have friends like us? Right.

Yeah. And he did say it was February 24th. So it's coming. It's right around the bend, right? Like 2023. Yeah. It was February 24th of 23. That's right.

I just said everything that we said just now, but I said it in like two seconds. So it's pretty good. Yeah. Somewhat audibly somewhat somewhat somewhat i got excited i'm very excited tonight am i going first did we decide you are going first jay-z is leading off the charge tonight which never before in the 10 years of this show on the shopping spree episodes here it is uh yeah okay well let me tell you what i put together this time so this time you know i always try to do something a little different you know just have a little fun uh alan and uh i was so good at like actually like knowing what they're talking about and like knowing things about products and like researching and stuff and i am

i'm not that person uh so you know i take a little different tack on it are you the type of person that if i were like what kind of car do you drive you're like it's blue yeah i okay so the other day i like started to get into somebody else's car at the bank was it nicer than yours i don't even know what kind of was because I don't know what car it is I literally came back and started getting it and it was someone who left their car running when they went to the ATM machine

so I opened it and I'm like it looks weird dude I can't even imagine wait was it a woman or was it a man I don't know I got the heck out of there because I can't even imagine the panic like if some woman turned around and saw you yeah you know what though you know what though he would have fit right in area florida man takes someone else's car like it wouldn't have even been

that weird you wouldn't have even made the nightly news right no they just the person would have saw me and then run and jumped on the hood i would have taken off and you know that would have been it they're like what do you mean he doesn't have an alligator in his pocket well forget it it's not newsworthy yeah exactly so yeah it was so awkward i think i got away with i closed the door real quick and took off very nice very nice my wife's like what's going on what are you doing she's, why do we have a new car? And why isn't this one blue? Seriously, who leaves their car unlocked and running when they go to the ATM machine? Oh, I used to do that all the time. What?

No. Like you're in a place where it gets cold sometimes. No. It makes sense to kind of keep the car running, but no. No. What? No, you turn it off. Like from a walk-up ATM?

Yeah, you turn the car off, you walk up to it yeah you park i mean normal human being no yeah that's when you like you turn the stereo up extra loud because you got to have your jams going you know your theme music going while you're at the atm it sounds like you might have a new Florida neighbor. Yeah, you fit right in here. Come on down. Well, I don't like alligators, so I don't know if it's going to work out. We're getting iguanas here in Orlando. Big ones.

You sound happy about that, though. No, no, I'm not. They're creepy. They are very creepy, and they're creepy yeah they're very creepy and they're big they're really big they actually made the news recently like somebody freaked out because an iguana jumped on their back oh yeah i mean they're big jump yeah yeah man yeah they're fast and they got big old claws and yeah they can be up to five feet long we're going can we just talk about the show all right i don't need this. Al is not sleeping tonight.

All right, let's do a three-hour episode so he actually passes out in his chair. All right. Well, yeah, so I'll get going. I don't have a ton of stuff, but I do have a theme, and it's a little bit different this year, but it's not super jokey-jokey. So I had a friend who kind of got into,'ll call it you know for lack of a better term biohacking oh but no no no biohacking so they got into kind of measuring uh their basic uh vital stats and kind of graphing it and working with a nutritionist working with a personal trainer and they kind of went down deep into the rabbit hole and uh they learned a bunch of interesting stuff and i think they're kind of you know sick on it now, which is not to be expected, I think. But, uh, they learned a

lot of stuff along the way and I thought it was kind of cool. And so I kind of put together a little list of the kinds of things that you can buy that would help you along that journey. Should you choose to go on it? I'm not recommending that you go down this journey. Uh, because I, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I think there's such thing as like too much information. Like you might be better off just like, you know, doing other things. But that's up to you.

And so with that mixed blessing, let me give you a bunch of stuff to spend money on. Please. So first item, Withings is a company that makes kind of smart devices

for your health. This is a machine that attacks your blood pressure and I actually use this one. They have a little app so you'll track

and everything. You just need the device and the actual app is free. Of course, everything has subscription plans and stuff now.

But this thing is going to run you about $100. Which is expensive and there are other ones but what I like about Withings is that Withings actually has like subscription plans and stuff now but this thing is going to run you about 100 bucks which is expensive and there are other ones but what i like about withings is that withings actually has a bunch of other devices too and it'll kind of pop all that stuff in it syncs nicely with like apple health and stuff like that and it's just kind of nice now one thing i learned about blood pressure measurements is they are all total crap the ones you use at home every machine if you look at an accuracy

and if you ask your doctor about it they'll tell you it's crap they'll tell you the one the grocery store is crap they'll tell you the one in their office is crap there's no such thing as far as i can tell it's like a good blood pressure machine unless you do the old school thing where you like have a timer and you count and you count and then you look at the dial you know it sounds crazy but like everything you know like what i'm talking about and stuff they're like that's the only way to really do it everything else is uh pretty rough but you know as long as it's consistent you know then it's okay hey wait i think it's worth calling out though even though you say that maybe this thing's garbage it has 10 910 ratings and it's a 4.2 so that's not terrible

in the world of buying products right oh yeah i should say it's kind of it's just the best of breed okay like consumer type stuff like i'm sure you can get some fancy doctor one that's gonna run you 400 bucks you know i got a counter one for you that is $53 and also has an app that you can sync to it, and it'll sync into your health kit and all that kind of stuff. Interesting. I know this brand, too. Omron. Yeah, Omron, and it has over 69,000 reviews.

Higher rating. And I have it. I have that one. The one thing that you have to know about the about the blood pressure uh things is like joe said they're all crap but what what's important is one make sure you're using the correct size cuff for you because you can use the if you use the wrong size uh you know it will mess mess that up. But also it's important, like what your seating position is and how your arm is resting.

Like you can't have your arm rested up. Your arm should be by your side. And if you have eaten or had caffeine, that'll throw it off. So the most important thing to do with this type of thing is not to care about accuracy so much as you care about consistency and if you have a device that is consistently showing you like maybe it's five points off but if it's consistently five points off then okay whatever right yeah that's fair yeah totally and

so like i didn't mean to say that like they're all like terrible you shouldn't use i'm just being like that uh just the accuracy is kind of rough, and so depending on what you read. But yeah, the Omron brand is another one that's kind of trusted. I actually have some stuff from them coming up. It's also important to point out, though, too, that if you have an FSA, some of these are FSA-eligible items that you can use. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, there you go.

Uh, and I'm sure, uh, HSAs work too. I don't really know the difference, but that's a whole, that's a whole episode. Um,

anyway, that's like another three hour episode. Yeah. So, uh, the reason I like withings and withings is totally like just a competitor to Omron, like flat out,

like they make a lot of the same stuff. So a lot of things I can say about withings, you can say about Omron, uh, like withings has a smart scale so you know weigh it'll zap your feet figure out your you know um bmi you know all the body mass index all that stuff a lot of that stuff is contrary like i'm just gonna stop saying that things are controversial or things are you know uh inaccurate because you could say that about pretty much any health device which is unfortunate and true and also uh at the doctors i don't know if you ever had an experience where like someone takes your blood pressure and they're like wait that's not right and they do it

again they're like okay that's better yeah yeah pros do it too so yeah the the primary advantage of this uh $200 scale is that it syncs with the same app that the blood pressure cuff I mentioned does. Oh wait, you moved on. I didn't realize it. I've got another one for you. Yeah. So the problem that I have with some of these like with the like I didn't want to have to sync these

like I didn't want to have to create accounts for everything and then like that be publicly available kind of stuff. Yeah. So there's another one. Oh wait, is it, uh, well,

it looks like the one that I specifically got has been updated. Cause the one I'll include the link to it anyways, it's no longer available, but, um, well, this one's Bluetooth. So it probably syncs to like Apple health or whatever else you want it to do. Yeah.

But sometimes they require that you create an account in order to, in order to, to do that. But, um, so that's the one, that's the one downside. So,

uh, I didn't realize this one was available anymore, but it had like over 9,000 reviews. So just another, another, do you have this one, Jay-Z uh my mom has it okay yeah he likes it pretty good yeah i've used it that greater that greater good ones is the one that i've got that one and there's a there's a new one by it that's like 45 but there's this other one that's like $45, but there's this other one that's like, uh,

e-tech city that's got like 175,000 or over 174,000 reviews. But I don't know if it requires you create an account. And that was the, that was the nuisance about some of these like health apps. If you're going to get into like the idea of like, you know, uh, how, how did you start it? Like I caught a biohacking that's yeah it's everything's got an asterisk but there's they've also caught it like a quantification of self you know like you know 20 years ago um i just didn't like the idea of having to create an account for everything that you know it was going to be synced up to their site. Yeah, this is kind of scary about putting all that stuff in one basket, too, let alone anyone's basket.

Well, you probably have something for this, too. But Winnings has a contactless thermometer that you can use, and it'll sync into the same kind of program. So that'll bring this stuff up. And like I mentioned, my mother's got some of the stuff. She'll bring it into our doctor's office and stuff and show them. The doctor will have her do stuff stuff and she's able to kind of show that there which is pretty cool i will say the withings look really nice like their devices

are just pretty like they're they're like the apple of of health devices right like they they put a lot of thought into the design and the way they look yeah they are not the cheapest by far you can find a cheaper alternative for every one of these but i just like the ecosystem is what i'm familiar with you know it's the ones i've kind of worked with uh so yeah that's it i do not have a replacement for that one all right well uh let's keep going then so this i have I have not tried, uh, the, you know, with things also makes a sleep tracking pad. Sure.

You can get that stuff from your, uh, from your watch and some, uh, some like phones will even do it. There's even like little games or little apps you can run on your phone and it'll record you sleeping and you're snoring and all that stuff. Uh, so yeah, that exists.

Uh, but with things has a sleep tracking pad. You can actually get two of them and use them in tandem as well. Uh, I think it's for a full-size bed. I'll have to look up which actual size it is. I don't know if that even matters. But it's basically a pad that goes under your mattress and you sleep on it and it'll check stuff.

What's kind of nice about that is you don't have to remember to put it in sleep mode or anything. It just knows when you kind of get on the bed. But it's also probably awkward if you, I don't know, put a big box on the bed or or something maybe it messes up i don't know i haven't tried this one but uh it's just kind of interesting so just kind of want to put the bug in your ear that uh this thing does exist and uh it's interesting and some sale right now it's on it went lower for 117.99 are you planning on getting this thing no okay i i just use my apple watch if anybody who who has an apple watch if you wear that while you're asleep it'll it'll track and show you similar type of stuff but there's something i don't like about the apple watch like namely the battery life that

makes it difficult um but that leads into one of my other items. I'm kind of going out of order here. So what I like for, uh, as far as watches go, uh, and specific to health, cause I have an Apple watch. I love it. Uh, would not trade it for any other kind of watch, but I did briefly or for like two years or something. I had a Fitbit charge, uh, watch and there's some really nice things about it. Number one, seven days of battery life, you know, charge it every day. You take a shower with it. You go swimming with it. You just leave it on. You forget about it number one seven days of battery life you know charge it every day you take a shower with it you go swimming or that you just leave it on you forget about it it's great forget about it forget about it also continuous heart rate monitoring uh even

when you're not exercising it's just all the time it doesn't have all the smart funky features of apple watch like nowhere near it doesn't have as cool of a screen doesn't do all the you know the neat stuff doesn't check your email. It just does really good monitoring. And it'll give you all the standard stuff like your blood oxygen rate, your heart rate variability, it'll track your sleep, all that sort of stuff. So yeah, and that one is going to run you.

That price is not correct. Did I just post it? I don't think. $100. Yeah, it's $100 right now. Okay. It's regularly 160 yeah okay i was gonna say i paid more than that dang it all right it's on it's on black friday sale great hopefully cyber monday as well yeah all right uh so you're ready to get into more interesting stuff let's do it okay well first i got something uh this is actually not a recommendation even when we post it um well i've tried it and really didn't like it uh this is

a smart ring oh i remember you telling us i think you told us about this thing oh and this is actually not the this is not the brand that you mentioned outlaw has one uh that's not the one i've got listed here this is a different one because it looks cooler but i i think yeah this one looks like lord of the ring style type yeah it's 209 uh so you know it's not cheap but it's got a bunch of sensors on it so it'll get you like your uh hrv your blood oxygen situation uh see some of them even get your blood pressure i don't remember if this one was. Ultimately, that's why we returned the one that my wife got because the blood pressure was way off, even compared to the weddings. We did some comparisons, and the ring was total garbage. I think it was the Oura ring or whatever.

But this one, I haven't tried it, but it looks cool. So at least you got that. And it's got one review, so it's got to be good. Yeah. That's right. It totally isn't the person who made it or is selling it but but i think you mentioned this before so i'm guessing like if you did get one that was pretty accurate like this is pretty sweet because it's a tiny

tiny device compared to anything else right yep yeah and aura oh actually auras look nicer i'm gonna go ahead and just change my link to the Aura ring, which is the brand that I had kind of intended to go with. All right, let's see this thing. It basically looks the same. In fact, it looks so similar that it makes me think that whatever link I have here is actually just a... Rebranded? Yeah, a rebrand of it.

Or, you know, like basically a knockoff like you're gonna get you're gonna get robbed if you uh use that link so let me get you another one wow that's awesome okay and it's 269 so it's more expensive uh i only have a best buy link so if you remember those those people they're still around they have stores one of the few or uh ring 269 so i don't know what my total is but it doesn't matter because this one has They're still around. They have stores. One of the few. Or a ring to sustain. So I don't know what my total is, but it doesn't matter. This one has good reviews though.

You know, one thing I will say this one thing about if, if it's sold at best buy, it's probably a decently reputable brand, right? Yes. So now both pictures of on amazon and on best buy though they show you wearing it on your index finger is that what it's designed for oh yeah i don't remember

where she wore it it's interesting yeah they do don't they because that's i wonder if it tells you in the description. Here, hold on. We should research live because that's always fun. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the people where everyone's... Oh, here's somebody not wearing it on the index. Nerd. Yeah.

Oh, there's actually somebody that asked that very question. Does the ring have to be worn on a specific finger? Hello. The aura ring does not have to be worn on a specific finger. the aura ring does not have to be worn on a specific finger the index middle and ring fingers usually work the best so that's really odd for marketing material they would put it on the index finger somebody everybody would wear it somewhere else somebody put it on their toe oh i don't know if that's gonna work the same but you know to each their own.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe it's great. Yeah, so you can put it on your middle finger and then take a picture to give your review. That's right. They said any finger. Yeah, I'm getting this side note, but I'm definitely getting to where I really look at the seller and the website before I ordered anything from Amazon because, man, so much stuff is suspicious. Yeah, it's just, man, I agree. It's actually gotten to where I think about what I'm going to buy on Amazon as opposed to five years ago where I just bought everything, you know?

Yeah. All right. Are you ready for some stuff you maybe haven't thought of as much or aren't familiar with? I don't think I've thought of any thought of as much or aren't familiar with? I don't think I've thought of any of this as much. Some people have thought about this stuff a lot. So here's this product called Cygnos. Anybody heard of Cygnos?

I have not. Cygnos is continuous glucose monitoring, but they're specifically targeted, which is, I should say, that's something that's usually associated with diabetes. You can monitor your glucose to see whether you're doing good, you're doing bad, whether you need to eat a snack, or if you need to go for a walk or whatever, call the doctor. So that's a really important medical device. Cygnos is different, though. Cygnos is continuous glucose monitoring that's directly marketed towards non-diabetics. And the sensors, I think, are basically free don't want you like plug this little needle into your arm or sort of little doesn't hurt uh doesn't feel great but it's not

terrible and uh the deal is that you uh have a subscription plan which you get down to 135 a month if you sign up for a year otherwise it's going to be more expensive 135 yep and what that gets you is you know free sensors that you have to swap out like every couple weeks and then access to this app that like kind of tracks your glucose and gives you little recommendations like hey you uh you you ate pizza and pudding tonight and now your glucose is terrible you should you know be good tomorrow that sort of thing and uh so you know it's cool for like obviously for diabetics or people that are kind of nearing the borderline which is great uh but also a lot of people have

gotten really into like athletes have gotten into glucose monitoring for trying to kind of maximize their health and fitness and their workouts and all that sort of stuff there's a bunch of interesting stuff too like i wore one for a little bit uh it's a long story but um i don't have diabetes but i just kind of wore it because a friend of mine got into it and my mom had some. It was a mix of a couple of things. Do you have a shot? It was interesting. I learned a bunch of stuff about glucose monitoring,

including exercise tends to shoot your stuff up almost the same way that eating candy would, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just that your adrenaline glands run and your blood needs to cycle and do some stuff i don't understand but it's interesting and if you are really trying to maximize your you know health and whatnot this is a you know kind of interesting product to get into but it's not cheap the cheapest you can get it to for this

product is 135 a month you know it's interesting if you look at the pricing because when you said that i was like oh my god but if you just do a one month plan it's 449 a month so so it's way better to just go ahead and sign up for six months at 134 months and just get it done if you're gonna do it right yeah i should say i didn't use signals i had a different one but that wasn't targeted towards whatever but i got to see my buddy's signals and stuff no i had actually i had two friends that did it and they were uh kind of obsessed with it for a little while i mean you know it's funny it just just on the side of of it not being too expensive i mean 134 a month isn't cheap right like but let's think about this most people are paying that for their cable and that's probably shooting their glucose through the time. So,

I mean, I don't know that this is too expensive for trying to monitor yourself and making sure that you're, you're creating better habits. Right. So, you know, coming from that,

that point of view, I think this isn't, this isn't terrible. Yeah. It's interesting. I can see if like, if you're training for the Olympics or something, I'm like,

yeah, sure. You know, you're going to spend way more than that on like wheatgrass or something a month yeah um but for you know i don't know if you're uh looking to try and maximize or just try something new or whatever it might be kind of interesting to experiment if you're into that sort of thing let's see what else man i would just like prefer to not have to do a monthly thing though. Yeah. Like,

why can't I just like, this is again where like, I don't want to have to create an account and sync data to some, you know, company that I don't know how long they're going to be around. You know, are you saying companies like 23 and me get hacked? Oh, sorry.

That doesn't happen. Um, so I haven't been there yet. So it's like, why like why why why is all that necessary you know just an app and some device that's gonna like sync to it and boom done like i don't know yeah yeah wait before before i actually say something totally wrong was it 23 and me or was it um something dna uh before you DNA before you say something before I just put it out there as it was total fact wasn't it 23andMe

that got hacked I believe so yeah yeah yeah it was okay alright millions more 23andMe user records oops

yeah so now we got some other stuff definitely getting the weird stuff i haven't tried um because you know but uh nothing nothing to it no i like like i actually feel bad it's a little i feel a little somber like i remembered everyone of their mortality uh Thanksgiving. You're welcome. So I just hope you enjoyed all that food. Yeah. Speaking of, there's a food sensitivity test.

This is the kind of thing that your doctor might try to order for you, but it's a third party company. It's $130 to run tests and to come back and say, hey, you shouldn't eat chicken or, you know, you should eat this or you should eat that. Is it good? I don't know. Is it a total scam? a total scam maybe but it's 130 you can try it and see probably more expensive if you go to your doctor and get it oh for sure sure i mean you're gonna pay 130 just to uh walk in the door yeah no doubt in the u.s uh so here's something similar a health test. It comes with a microbiome wipe. So this is surely scammy. You know. Wait.

What am I? What am I wiping? Yes, a wipe. Your geo discomfort away. This is disgusting. That's amazing. If you've taken a lot of antibiotics or you feel, you know, fatigued, low energy, brain fog, if you have frequent heartburn, if you have gas, bloating, abdominal pain, or nausea, this is starting to sound like a commercial. There's some other stuff. IBS, IBD.

Then, yeah, you should take a look at this. It's a gut health test. It's going to come back and tell you how healthy your gut is and have some recommendations for how to improve things. That's pretty interesting. Yeah. Man, these are all bummers, huh? Dang. No, no.

This is all interesting stuff. That one's just gross. Ah, man. These mailboxes are literally full of crap. Yeah. Your body processed everything. Now it's looking at the end result. The best way to find out the test is gross you should see some things they recommend people to do to treat that stuff yeah uh health and antiracism service 23 and me they just got hacked what that means is

probably not gonna get hacked again anytime soon right as we've seen sir uh with you know last pass and others you know one and done okay so but you jumped from last pass but you're not but you're jumping on board for 23 and me right yeah a little i've given up on anonymity i don't i've i'm going the opposite i'm just trying to like be that needle in the haystack i'm just trying to get my daddy in there with anyone else like i feel like those companies are trying to find the people that are hiding their stuff, and they're going to get you. So if you just flood all the services with your information, you're safe. Yeah, exactly. That was the Leo Lepore kind of strategy on all the social media platforms and everything.

It was like, just flood all of them with everything and then nobody will ever find anything. That's amazing. Surely that works. Obscurity through public, something hiding in plain sight. Also, I put Soylent on here, which is a thing where you can get meal subscriptions for $230

a month. That's the cheapest plane. It ends up being about $3 per meal. How much per meal? It's literally named soylent yeah i know do they not know the movie i you would think right like if you're gonna name your company that like maybe i don't know see if that name has ever been used for anything ever before and then consider like someone like green is people uh yeah what a terrible product name yeah and then consider something like greatest people. What a terrible product name. Here's a food for you to eat. It's just a reference to an old movie.

Ha ha, here, eat it. How much per meal would you say? $3.30 I think. $3.30? That's actually really good. The price is good. I would rather eat people than eat this. I don't know if you've tried one of these.

It's basically sludge. Oh, it's not good? I mean, if this is your thing, I don't want to dog on you. But it doesn't really compare to a hamburger. But if you're the kind of person who's ordering Soylent, hamburgers are not on the menu for you. Oh, man. Yeah.

So the deal with Soylent is basically they market it as the world's most perfect food. They've created the most nutritionally complete, convenient, and sustainable food on the planet. And it tastes amazing. And it works for everybody. And it's basically these kind of like shaky type things. These juices that have things that your body needs anyway. And you'll never crave chocolate

again. Yeah. I mean, they have a chocolate flavor. I'm sure it tastes just like chocolate. Yeah, delicious. So, you know, it's nice. Some people, I've been eating this. I think you can just eat it 100% of the time. So if you're like one of those people that's just so sick of like, you know, making food all the time, whatever, you can just sign up for this and just, you know, just drink this.

I'm so tired of delicious cuisine. I think I'm going to take a sip. I'm tired of eating. I can't get over the name, though. I'm like in tears. I'm like. I know. over the name though i'm like in tears i'm like why didn't you if you're going to name it that why not just like fully play into it in like one of the flavors be caucasian or american

so i didn't even know about this movie by the way soylent green oh it's old so yeah 1973 so i i'm gonna have to check this out now because it's not worth it some humor don't waste your time no it doesn't hold up it was like watching it i i don't even know that like cult classic cult classic is really applicable here kind of thing short story is like they're feeding people Soylent Green and it turns out that Soylent Green is made from people. Okay. Yeah, that's good. Most people know it from The Simpsons. And other references in sci-fi and whatnot. Yeah, terrible name for a product. When I first heard about it, I was like, no way. I thought it was like a reference to something you'd see in Silicon Valley or something. But no, it's a real product.

They've been around for a long time now, I think like 10 plus years. And yeah, they've been selling stuff. I don't know. Yeah. So yeah, there you go. If you want to hack yourself and get a bunch of devices and spend all your time obsessing about your health, here's a list for you to follow.

And if you know of any other things that you're doing it's good i don't i sound so negative on it like it's good stuff like i know people that are using uh almost every one of these uh and you know to great effect and really liking it uh it seems very stressful to me i think the whole quantify yourself that whole kind of philosophy like really stresses me out and like whenever i kind of get into that mode with anything with too much tracking like uh or with tracking at all i should say i tend to kind of burn myself out and then like rebel for a while you know so that's just my experiences with it but uh you know maybe maybe it works for you i do love it but um you have to make it convenient for you. That's why like the Apple watch, for example,

like you mentioned the Fitbit or that, what was it called? The Withings sleep tracking pad, you know, like I don't want to have to think about it. If I have to think about it, then I'll never get it. But if I can just like, if it just happens, you know, just works, then, you know, I'm going to i'm gonna be i'll be more diligent about it yeah i kind of like having the idea about getting into one ecosystem ecosystem

so you're not like getting several different notifications from different things all the times you know like you're only getting one like pumping you to sign up for the premium plan or whatever well yeah my my preference here lately has been anything that will sync to apple health kit i don't care i don't i don't care what their app does as long as it'll sync to health kit and i don't want to have to create an account for them yeah so that's that's quickly going the wayside though it seems like everybody wants to do that garbage nowadays yeah which i get it data's money all right oh wait before we go uh i like to end on a high note so i'll have a link here for like a 50 pound bag of chocolate or something all right

i like it wait isn't that gonna like mess up your blood sugar yeah yeah a little bit okay as long as you recognize it they tell you to stop uh start at rock bottom well this this is kind of like financing right like would you finance uh would you buy a hundred million dollar house well if i can finance it for a hundred million years sure right like so so you get a 50 pound bag of chocolate just do a little bit every day for the next 20 years. You're fine. They don't sell it in bags when you get up to this weight. They sell it in slabs, actually. It's not cheap.

$4.68 for 50 pounds of pure milk chocolate. Oh, my God. Though, like, there was some documentary thing that I was watching recently. Like, all the chocolate. Where was it? Oh, maybe it was like a John Oliver or something. Like, all the chocolate. Like, the majority of chocolate comes from like a few manufacturers something now i'm questioning it though if it was john oliver it was all a joke

no i believe like i i was i got some uh some bike stuff replaced recently on my bike and the guy was complaining to me about it's like you know all this stuff comes from the same factory in the same place they just changed the name on it. Dude, that's air conditioning HVAC stuff. Most of them are manufactured in the same spots. Come off the same assembly lines, all that kind of garbage. It's ridiculous. Guitars, too, actually. Yeah, doesn't surprise me.

All right, so 50 pounds of chocolate is a high note for sure. Yep. All right, so for me, I actually did a few things that are sort of developer centric. So the very first thing I have here is something that I might get this year, but I'll admit that it's even a bit high for my tastes. So this is the Kinesis advantage 360 is their new keyboard. And the difference between this and the Kinesis advantage 360 is their new keyboard and the difference between this and the kinesis advantage 2 that i've actually reviewed on amazon and all that kind of stuff is first off it's like 130 140 dollars more so it's 450 bucks for the non-bluetooth model which is not cheap by any

stretch wait you gotta pay more to have it wired oh no yeah no less less wired it's even more bluetooth it's another um 30 bucks on top of that so it's for 480 for the bluetooth version but where this is different than the kinesis advantage too is it's got the same concave layout of the keys and all that except now you can separate the keyboard so you don't have this fixed width between the two halves and you can tent them like this thing is like supremely tentable so you can like angle it almost as much as you want and my favorite feature is all of the cords are replaceable yeah so i mean let's be honest 450 is a lot of money for a keyboard right like straight up that's that's almost obscene level type stuff for that 50 pounds of chocolate or three months of glucose

right there you go i like how you're saying this is almost obscene for a keyboard 450 dollars no that's pretty obscene like it's ridiculous I mean no it's absolutely obscene yeah it's obscene so I mean like the advantage too at 320 bucks I thought was pushing sort of the boundary I want to say the moon lander was like 350 right and that also that like that's right there at the edge of what I think is halfway reasonable for something that that is good for ergonomics and all that this is a little bit over the top however it does look pretty fantastic so i might give it a shot and and i may do a review on it i would say that if you were already in the kinesis advantage game then i think this would

be a no-brainer to go to yeah maybe i mean i still love my advantage too i use it every day and it is a fantastic device and so maybe this is even better well the reason why i say that though is like so the tinting you know being able to like tint it to your custom like your preference that's a big deal but also being able to like because it's because the two halves are independent now, you can kind of rotate them in. So on my, what am I, the Kinesis Freestyle Gaming, RGB Gaming. I think it's called the Freestyle RGB Gaming. Yeah, it's too long. It's really too much.

But I don't have, the keys aren't straight. I kind of have them like, you know, twisted in it. Cause if you set your hands on the, on a table, you know, your hands aren't like,

um, like straight out in front, you know, they're, they're, they're kind of tilted into each other. They're kind of angled into each other. So that's the way I have my,

my keyboard. And I would love this because of that, except for that gigantic price tag. Yeah. I mean, I might check it out. This is more like the moon lander in terms of how you can remap keys and stuff. Like it comes with,

with software that allows you to do that. So at any rate, yeah, big price tag looks like a super premium, nice keyboard. So that's number one, number two. So this came back up and this, this one's really interesting to me. And I think anybody here that's listening to this

podcast should consider this. So Joe recursion, Joe, Joe Ridley, I think that's yeah. He, a long time ago when we were talking about, you know, Hey, you should go buy this book and it's an O'Reilly book or you should buy this book or whatever. He's like, yo, um, sign up for an ACM membership for a hundred bucks a year and you have access to all the, the entire O'Reilly library. Right. Oh, that was, that wasn't a, I don't think that was Joe that made that. Um, it was the, uh, uh, design pattern design principle evangelist. Um, Oh, you're right. It was the design principle evangelist.

Oh, you're right. It was Jim. Yes, Jim. Jim Hummel. Yeah, my bad. So, yes, he mentioned this several times. So we actually did it. Well, what happened was, I think last year or the year before, ACM lost their partnership with O'Reilly.

O'Reilly's like, no, we want more money, not doing it. So the, the ACM membership for $99 a year where you're getting access to all those books, they're like, no, man, we're not getting enough money. Well, they've, they've changed it. So right now, like during the holiday season, the ACM membership is $75. So it's 25% off. And there's an add-on bundle now that you can do that will give you access to not only O'Reilly now, but it also gives you access to Pluralsight and I think one other service as well. And I can't remember what

it is, Ralph. So you get, it says right here, training videos from O'Reilly. That's the books, Skillsoft, Persepio and Pluralsight on the latest technologies. So for right now, if you were to sign up, it'd be 150 bucks a year. You'd have access to the ACM, which they do publish a lot of really killer articles, but then you also get access to all the O'Reilly books, their entire catalog, as well as plural site as well. That is a fantastic deal. So if you're into learning. Do they have the O'Reilly Safari thing back then? They do.

Yep. And that's what this is. Because what's not clear to me though, is that it says get unlimited access to ACM's collection of thousands of online books, courses. Because ACM, like when we had our subscription they had their own so they did no click the link click the link and then go down past the second the second radio button and you'll see a check box this is the ACM skills bundle

yeah that's where it is so it's an add-on you actually have to pay extra for it and the only reason i even knew about this is acm emailed me directly and was like hey you know we know that a lot of you were here for the o'reilly content and all that and that's what that's where they announced this so if if you are big into reading various books like we do on this show and you're trying to stay ahead and keep all your skills going and all that. Absolutely. Killer deal. I got that email, but I thought it was like,

I thought I remembered it being like a survey of like, Hey, if we did this, would you come back? Kind of thing. They did that initially. I filled that out and then they sent out a followup that was like, Hey,

we've repartnered. So we do that then. Yeah. It's fantastic. It's a killer deal. I mean, straight up 150 bucks a year. I mean, we spent 50 bucks on a book. Yeah. You probably spent 50 bucks on it, right? Shut up. Yeah. So, so I mean, seriously, like this deal is a no brainer. If you, if you crack three books a year, you've already, you've already made your money on it.

All right. So now the next one up, and this is following along with the just personal development in this world. So this one's a tough one for me. I think it's worth it, but only for a couple of reasons. So this one I'm going to say is LinkedIn premium. Now, one thing that drives me crazy as much as, as outlaw hates the fact that everybody wants you to sign up for accounts. I hate when I go to find out how much something costs and they're like, start your free membership. And there's nowhere to click to find out, well, what does that mean after the free membership's up, right? So what I found is LinkedIn Premium is $30 a month, all right? Now, here's where I think it's valuable. And this is the first one

for me. The big one is you get access to all of LinkedIn learning. Now they don't list it on their overview page, which is hot garbage because it's a really big selling point for me anyways. Um, and the LinkedIn learning tools is think plural site. Like it's a bunch of super high quality courses. A lot of times they'll have certificates that you get at the end of it. If you take like little tests and all that kind of stuff, really good stuff. I've done several spring courses like with Java. I've done like agile stuff. I'd like, I've, I've gone through a bunch of courses on there and it's really good. So that's a big one. Now, the next couple of things

that I think are worth talking about is if you are somebody that's in the market or considering moving companies or whatever, there's a couple of things that are nice. They, they pitch a bunch of their AI stuff, whatever, maybe it's good. Maybe it's not, but they say they have AI stuff that'll help you write messages or, or help you improve your profile, whatever. Maybe it's amazing. I don't know. I haven't tried it. Don't care that much. There are a couple of things that I think are amazing. You can directly message anyone outside of your network within mail. Now, if you are on LinkedIn, you'll know that if, if like me, right? Like if you want to reach out to me, if you haven't requested to be my

friend and I haven't approved it, you can't direct message me unless you're a recruiter that's paying extra money for their LinkedIn business or whatever, right? When you're a LinkedIn premium member, you can actually reach out to people individually, right? Like you have that ability. Another thing is your job search. You kind of get some of the beefier, better things that will match with you and all that kind of stuff, which can be absolutely fantastic for you if you're in the job market. There's two more that I think are fantastic. Hey, real quick. I just want to mention Buffer is a thing that we mentioned a few times. It lets you schedule social media posts. It actually has an AI feature built in and it's super good.

Actually. Okay. I've been writing some messages, like some automated tweets, like, Hey, don't forget to sign up. It's really nice builder,

like type one message and say, Hey, make it more professional, make it more goofy or, you know, more playful, like generate again, just so it's not the same message.

If people are saying it more than once, I actually love it. Okay. That's cool. I mean, that's good feedback. So maybe this thing up, maybe I should check it out. So being that I'm a Microsoft MVP, I actually have access to this. I'm not paying for it, but I have access to all these things. So, you know, I try to utilize as much as I can while I'm in here. So there's a couple of things that I think are fantastic. One, you can see who's actually looking at your profile. So, you know, you'll get messages in LinkedIn, like 20 people looked at your profile this week and it's like, okay, who were they? Right. And you can go look if you are a LinkedIn premium member, that's huge. Another thing that I like a lot is you can

actually make yourself invisible when you're going and looking at other people's profiles. You can do that as a LinkedIn premium member. So, you know, if you're thinking about some old coworker and you're like, man, I wonder what they're up to. And you go search for them. You're not going to pop up into their history. Right? So, so those are some features that I think are here. But again, I think the LinkedIn learning platform, especially if you're trying to quickly ramp up on things is absolutely fantastic. I'd put it on par with the plural sites of the world because they also much like plural site over time started making people follow templates and do very professional type courses. LinkedIn learning has the same thing. So you're not going to get a bunch of like,

you know, hit or miss type things like you would, if you went to Udemy and bought some nine 99 course, the, everything here is like super polished. All right. So let's see next up I have, okay. So this is another keyboard thing. And outlaw and I've actually talked about this one. Oops. Outlaw. We talked about this recently. So I ended up buying an iPad pro because when I'm like researching things for the show or whatever like a lot of times I'm consuming right and I don't necessarily want a laptop in my lap for doing that kind of thing and and I for whatever reason I don't even know why but the screen on my iPad is easier to look at than my laptops for the most part, different screen technologies, whatever. They're just easier on the eyes. Well, one of the things that drove me crazy is I don't

like propping that thing up. I don't want to hold that thing the entire time I'm trying to watch something. And I cannot to this day stand typing on a touch screen. I don't care if it's an iPhone. I don't care if it's an Android. I don't care if it's an iPad. I don't want to touch type on anything. I hate them. I hate screen typing. Never want to do it. So I'm sorry. I didn't realize we were in boomer hour. I think we did start it early. Okay. Oh, so, so I needed a case for my iPad because you're crazy if you don't have one. And, and obviously I went and bought a screen protector and all that because something's going to happen if you don't have it on there. It'll happen within a week. So Logitech.

So there's two kind of premium keyboards you can get for iPads, iPad Pros. There's the one that's from Apple, which is really nice, but it's like a fixed stand. You have this nice keyboard and it's like a fixed stand. It's, it's you, you have this nice keyboard and it's 300 bucks. Like it ain't cheap. And, and it holds your iPad at a certain angle and that's all you got, right? Like that's it. So I was looking at that, the Logitech combo touch keyboard or touch. I think it's called the, the combo touch. What sweet is it's a case for your iPad and it sets it up like a surface. So you have this little kickstand thing in the back that you can bend out to whatever angle you want. And then the keyboard is actually strongly attached via magnet.

So you can set this thing up kind of however you want. And if you want to do it like the, the iPad cases that came out that where you have sort of like this pyramid thing, you can even flip the keyboard up underneath it and have it as sort of a base for the stand to land on. So I've found this thing to be absolutely fantastic. The keyboard is wonderful and I love this thing. And now here's the deal. If you go looking for this, know that you have to find the one that fits whatever iPad that you have. So that's one advantage this has over the pro or the Apple keyboard is the Apple keyboard, I believe is only made for the iPad pros.

They make a version of this even for the regular iPads. So you can get it for an iPad 10 or air or whatever they are. Plus you can get them for the pros. So at any rate, love these things. They run anywhere from a hundred right now on sale, anywhere from 120 bucks for like a regular iPad to 180 for the 13 inch iPad pro. So love these things. Can't recommend it highly enough. You can use the magic keyboard with the iPad air. Oh, can you? I'm looking at Apple's site compatible with the 12.9 inch iPad pro, the 11 inch iPad pro and the iPad air fifth and sixth gen.

Okay. But that link that you sent, there were, I, I would have never even guessed this. And I don't even know how comfortable I would be trying this. But there are so many knockoffs out there. It's ridiculous. Of keyboards that look identical to the Apple Magic keyboard.

I'm looking at one. It's like 66 bucks. Yeah. You know that's not real. Yeah. Yeah. You can find one for 16 if you look hard. You should sign up for Teemu. That's my tip of the week right there.

Right, yeah. Amazon has gotten really annoying with this stuff. Well, but I mean, even he mentioned Teemu. Like, they're the same thing, though. Yeah, totally. It's crazy. It's ridiculous. Someone's really cool. I'm like, oh oh i didn't know i wanted this right i'm gonna buy it now all right so this one actually came up

this next one because jay-z mentioned that he was going through some heartache with his joe's act.com and he was looking for for email and all that kind of stuff, you should have a vanity domain, you know, jozak.com or alanunderwood.com or whatever, like get one. If you're a developer, you should probably advertise yourself on your own space and keep your own things on your own space, as opposed to always putting it on LinkedIn or wherever else. So for me personally, I know he had some heartache with Google. It's why I never buy any Google services because they just throw things out with, you know, throw the baby out with the bathwater type stuff all the time. I use Namecheap and I have been using them for years.

I absolutely love them. The prices are fair. They throw in domain privacy by default and they also have DNSSEC on, which means that they make sure that your site can't get hijacked and redirected to some other server. So those are things they have by default. And again, they have really good domain tools, DNS stuff. I've done all kinds of funky stuff with them and they just work really well. So I've probably used 10 different registrars over the years. And I always come back to this one. Like I ended up moving most of my domains over here because I just really liked them. So, and my recommendation

is if you do that, you know, I personally would go WordPress and then use one of the plugins. It'll spit out HTML, right? Like that's how I go so that you can create your content fairly quick and then get a nice website up. So, but you know, it's each their own. Um, all right. So here's another one. And this also Jay-Z for whatever reason, I guess we've been doing this so many years. Every time we do this, I'm like, Ooh, that's a good idea. So the last one I think is when he did a bunch of investing things like, you know, you can do some real estate stuff or whatever. So I got to thinking about this. I've started using discord more lately because I find that there's really good groups for various topics on there and people seem really engaged on discord.

I don't know what it is about that particular platform, but there's a lot. So I thought, man, what if there, you could just find a bunch of investing topics on Discord and see what it is? And there's a list of things. So, hey, I'm not trying to say that any one of these is amazing, but this is a big list of people that are talking about investing tips all the time. And so maybe join that, see, and maybe don't throw all your money in on the first thing that somebody says. You ever know about the discords that I'm in? A lot of them have really cool bots. That was just a bot ecosystem, super powerful for discord.

My wife's in a discord that requires you to post like so many times a day or so many times a week to even stay in. So like it gets rid of lurkers and like it's just really interesting it keeps the um like makes it easier to see what's going on in the uh in the actual server and it kind of keeps like bots and stuff our people from getting their accounts hacked and whatever taken over and that's just like it's barely scratching the surface there's all sorts of weird games you can play with bots and just various different behaviors it's really cool cool. Yeah, I like them. So that was it for sort of like the developer type things. So my next thing that I want to say is go do something you love. So I say this as somebody that is constantly busy. Right. Um, I bring this up because like, we're not as active in Slack as

what we used to be. And I kind of hate that, but it's because we've got so much going on, right? Like with work and everything else, getting ready for the podcast, all that kind of stuff. So, um, I'm trying to put the, uh, put the URL in here. So I just recently went to an audio show. It was called capital audio fest and it was up North of DC in Maryland. And it was such a fun time for me. Like it basically, all you're doing, they basically booked up a huge hotel. I want to say it was the Hilton. Um, they booked up a huge hotel, moved all hotel, moved all the furniture out of the rooms, and then people, companies, manufacturers, whatever, they came in and set up rooms with speakers and amplifiers and DACs and all kinds of stuff. And I spent two full days walking around listening to systems and

looking at cool gear and all that kind of stuff. And it was just so much fun to me. And it was nice to sort of go do that and come back. And I felt like recharge, right? Like I was excited. Like I went and looked at something that I really enjoyed. So in an outlaw actually mentioned that he's like, man, I want to go to SEMA, right? Like I want to go, I want to go to SEMA. I want to go look at some cool cars. And I feel like you got to take time to go do the things that you like. I mean, you work hard, you do that, put aside some budget money to go do some of that stuff. Now, because of that, I have some things that I'd come back and I thought I'd share with you because I love audio. I mean, if you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you know, those two guys love guitars and I love sound. Like I can't make sound, but I can listen to a lot of it. So the first one is, I don't know if

you've ever heard of a company called ELAC, but they make speakers and they're typically relatively affordable speakers that perform very well for their price points. Well, they showed off a brand new set of speakers that they, that they were just releasing in these things, man, I'm telling you now, I'm not even kidding you. There were some rooms. I went in a capital audio fest that had $2 million worth of speakers and amplifiers like that. I can't even fathom what that even means. Right. Can you just imagine like you, you and your family are on a road trip and you'd like booked some hotel room,

you know, because like, you know, an Expedia or whatever orbits, you know, whatever, you know, that,

that happened to be the best rate, right? You're like, yeah, this is going to be great. We'll get, we'll, we'll go there we'll stay there we'll be able to rest we'll go tour the capital blah blah blah boom boom yeah music cranking all day yeah for sure hey you know what's funny about that in all honesty when i when i was looking for tickets to fly out there and stay i i originally was like hey hey babe do you want, do you want to go with me? And then I was like, Whoa, Whoa, hold up. You're going to get tired of this after like 30 minutes.

Like I don't want to not invite you, but you're not invited. You can't go with me because everyone's happier with this decision, by the way. Yeah, exactly. Totally. So, so it worked out, but all right. So back to these Elacs. So they, all right. So here's the thing that's so amazing about these. All right. They are powered speakers. They have their own amplifiers built in. So you don't have to worry about anything special. These things have every input you could possibly want. So if you're looking for something for like, maybe you have a bedroom TV and you want better sound, or if you have your computer, you know, you want some decent sounding speakers at your computer and you don't want to do anything

special. And maybe you want to hook up your phone to it on occasion. This thing has Bluetooth. It has HDMI EARC. It has RCA inputs. It's got every single possible input you could want to be able to hook up to this and just play music with no fuss. Right. And they actually sound very good, like super good. So for the price be super hard to beat these things. So, um, they are currently three 99 on sale and seriously, they, they had them set up in a room and they made the room sound great. Just those two little bookshelves playing. So,

um, I don't know that you call this out, but these are only like four and a half inch, uh, speakers. Yeah. They're not like they're, they're tiny.

Yeah. They, I, and I mean, honestly, it was shocking. So, so imagine you're going from room to room, right? Some of these rooms are a hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment. Some of them are like, you know, a million and you step into this room

and they have this little set of $400 speakers that are playing that sound pretty good. And then next to them, they have like some of their um better premium like floor standards that are like 7500 and you're like okay i mean i hear the difference but these things aren't like they're not making me sad you know what i mean so yeah i again and i what i love is the simplicity you set these up somewhere you haven't turned on you can can Bluetooth to it, right? Like you just want to play some music, whatever, like you don't have to think about it. And that's,

that to me is amazing. So yeah, it's nice. Yeah. Good, good audio always makes me happy. All right. I think I've talked about these on a previous episode,

but I have to mention it again because I truly hate the AirPod pro to ear tips that come with them. Can't stand them. They fall out of my ears nonstop, like make me furious to where I want to throw them and break them. The comply foam tips for them. It's funny. I think they jacked them up so that they could put them on sale because I want to say they used to be like $19. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think that's what they did. They're $23 right now, but you can get 25% off. So it'll probably be like $18, Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's what they did. They're 23 bucks right now, but you can get 25% off. So it'll probably be like $18, something like that. Um, highly recommend these. Now, one thing I do want to call out about these, if you go to the link that I have there, what you'll see is they have several options. They've got medium, large, small, and then assorted. Please do not buy the assorted. Like that's such a waste of money. Find out what size you need based off the ear tips that came with them and then buy the three

pack of those so that you have them because these things will get, I mean, outlaw you've had these before the comply foam tips. They get funky after a few months and you just need to throw that set out. They put the new set on, right? Like once they start getting a little bit crusty, it's time to move on. So, you know, just some good advice. All right. So the next one up this, this again, going along with the, my love of audio things. So I know there's a lot of people out there that have Sonos, right? And Sonos is really good because they make it very easy to just play music on any speaker in your house without having to worry about wires and all kinds of stuff. I hate their app. I've had to deal with it with, with, um, some family members. Their app is hot garbage. In my opinion, there sounds very good, but some of it's confusing.

If you want to stream basically any type of service that you can think of Spotify, title Cubos or Cobas, Apple music, Amazon music, whatever. There's a device from a company called WIM. It's W I I M. And they've actually got two devices. There's the W pro and the wing pro plus. Now what is a little bit special about these things is they're just streamers. So let's say that you have a receiver or something somewhere in your house that you want to be able to play music on that doesn't have Bluetooth or whatever. You can hook this thing up to it and then you stream to it and then it'll put the output to it. Absolutely fantastic device. And on top of that, the application that comes with it is killer. It is so polished.

If you want to stream, it's got all the interfaces there. You can even modify the EQ and stuff like it's truly killer. Now, the only reason and the only reason at all that I put the, oh, what did I do? That's the wrong spreadsheet. Um, I put the wing pro plus in there is if you happen to have a, let's say like a really nice system set up, right. That, that you want to hear things on the wing pro plus is basically the same device as the wing pro, except it has a better DAC in it. So it has a better chip set so that the,

the audio resolution will be even better. So if you have a really good set of speakers with a really nice setup, you might want to go this route because it's going to give you better sound quality. Digital analog. Yeah. A DAC is a digital to analog converter. So anytime that you're listening to anything off like Spotify, iTunes, whatever, or if it's coming from a computer, it's coming in digital, right?

Well, to send that out to speakers, it has to convert it to a sine wave, right? So it's taking those on-off signals from your digitals and turning it into a sine wave. So anytime that happens, there's a deck somewhere in your system, right? So that's what this thing does. But what it allows you to do is use all your streaming services, hook up your phones and whatever else to a simple device so that you can just plug this into whatever, sending that out to your speakers and you're good to go. So really nice. All right. So the next thing, all right, so now we're getting into some. Basically, the difference was that pro does up to 48 K and a plus pro plus does 192 K. No, actually they both will do that.

Um, I'm looking at their, their page. This is one of the inputs. Yeah. So if you scroll down on that page, it has them right. Um, the analog input is only 48 48k but your digital sources can actually come across at 192 24 so that's only talking for like your rca inputs or whatever um now i'm not gonna go deep down this rabbit hole but i'm really mad at apple um because that's a first well yeah right not for me so much but but here's what

drives me crazy here we go we've talked about their lossless and the fact that that's really sick and you get this for a good price and all that what i found out that drives me absolutely if you want their full resolution, you have to hook up a DAC to whatever is playing that to get 192.24. It will not do it. If you're listening on your headphones, any of your headphones, because they're Bluetooth signals, they're not even lossless. So you don't get lossless on your headphones unless they're plugged in. So your AirPod Pros, those even lossless. So you don't get lossless on your headphones unless they're plugged in. So your AirPod pros, those not lossless. Your Apple TV 4k will only do 2448. So 24 bit, 48 kilohertz.

You cannot even go higher than that. If you want to get the full 192 kilohertz, 24 bit out of a Mac, other than the brand new MacBook pros, they can actually do one 92, 24. Other than those, you actually have to hook up an external DAC to even get the full resolution. And it's like, why are you guys making it so hard to use what people pay for? It drives me absolutely insane. The other services like title co-buzz those out there, if you have the software, you have one 92 24, you don't have to do anything special. And that, that drives me insane. So at any rate, I said, I wouldn't go too far down the rabbit hole. I went far enough. Um, now this is something that I think Jay-Z might have an opinion on

because he's got some experience with this. So these are the last few things I've got on my list. So the first one is steam just came out with a new version of their steam deck that has an OLED screen. So hold on, before we talk about any of these in depth at all, let me put the other two out here. So, and I thought these were all really interesting because they play in the at all. Let me put the other two out here. So, and I thought these were all really interesting because they play in the same space. So the next one that I want to, that I want to mention, and then we'll go back and talk about these briefly is there's this thing called the Logitech G cloud, and it's a portable gaming console. But what's interesting about this thing

is it doesn't have a beefy processor built in. It is all about playing cloud gaming services or local play with like Microsoft's, what do they call it, where you can play in the house. I really call it screen or X play or something. Yeah, it's basically streaming from your xbox across your wi-fi to the device so the device is not graphically handling anything it's just getting the stream of video and inputs and outputs and going back and forth so here's the interesting thing so the steam deck oled starts at 549 that's for the 512 with, you know, whatever regular screen it has, you can get the one terabyte version for 649. And it actually comes with a nicer screen that I think is like, you know, anti-scratch and better reflectivity, all that kind of stuff. The

Logitech G cloud one that is basically for playing games, either from Microsoft Xbox pass or whatever it is, or Microsoft pass. And then there's an Nvidia one. There's an Nvidia streaming gaming platform. I can't remember what it's called or playing across your network, right? Local play on your network. That thing's 300 bucks. That could be a tremendous deal. If you just want to be able to sit on your couch and play your Xbox games, right. That are, that are that are you know down the hall and you don't want to take over the tv or whatever you know or or your wife's watching tv or whatever when you can just sit on the couch and play your xbox well now that you can sit on the couch and play your xbox well i'm sure and i don't even want to leave out women from this right like there's women that love the game and their husbands are like really i want

to watch some tv but they want you in the same room, right? Like how many times your wife been like, yo, you're going to come up out of the basement anytime soon. It's like, well, I guess my guild needs me. Right. So, so that's actually a fantastic option. Now there's one other one that I want to mention here, and then we can talk about the three like briefly. And there's actually two of these. I only put this one in because the price is right and it's brand new, just came out and they got some cool features. It's called the Lenovo Legion Go, and it has a Z1 extreme processor. So it's the newest AMD like, you know, mobile gaming processor.

Now, this thing's 750 bucks. Now, as far as now, there are a couple of things that are worth calling out that are pretty sweet about this thing. It has a 10 ADP display, but it's also 144 megahertz, um, refresh rate on it. So you actually have fast gaming refresh rates where I want to say the steam was always, um, a seven 20 P screen. And I think it was a lower refresh rate. Uh, the, the new OLEDs 90 Hertz, uh, or 90 megahertz. So no, it's Hertz 90 Hertz, not megahertz and 144 Hertz for the other one. So it's interesting because the Lenovo is a windows machine, right? Like it's basically running Windows 11 Home and the Steam Deck is running Steam's OS.

So in theory, it's probably a little bit lighter, way more gear. Yeah, it's Linux. And they've probably trimmed it down a lot, which I guess maybe with Lenovo and the Asus is the other one that I wanted to mention. They have a version of this as well. That's also 750 bucks.

But so now with that, I want to get your opinions on the Steam Deck because I know you've got one. And, like, what are your thoughts on it? I love it. It's great. It feels better than the Switch to me. It just feels really nice. I'm a little bit bummed that the OLED just came out

because I feel like I just got my Steam Deck not that long ago. Right. So, you know, there's pros and cons. Like, Nintendo Switch took forever to come out with the OLED version and they're taking forever to come out with version 2. So it's like total opposite. But I'm already heavily invested in the Steam ecosystem in general. And, you know, that's like where the bulk of my collection is.

And so it was kind of a no-brainer just to go there because it's so easy. It's all integrated. Everything just kind of works. You can do the streaming, you from your computer whatever like everything just just really nice so i that's what i would stick with you know um especially like windows and stuff like you know it's fine there's nothing wrong with windows like i've used it for a long time but just like there's something i really like about the steam deck just being so heavily geared for

like that one purpose you know just running steam games and I've done some other stuff I've installed some emulators and stuff just kind of fun and messed around so like I've like gotten root access and you know like set up um ssh and stuff and and kind of had some fun with it but like ultimately it's just a gaming device and I'm happy to have it that way and just not mess around with stuff so that's why I'd stick with and that's why I am sticking with but you know your mileage may vary well you also get instant on with that thing too right because it's actually developed for for gamers like a switch right yeah yeah the games and stuff are like building in um there's there's little nice things like with the app store you can go

in and be like uh they are basically going through and vetting like all their many thousands of games and saying this one's good this one has small text you know warning this one requires a mouse whatever oh nice uh so it's just nice to just kind of have that whole ecosystem already like built it around so you can go uh they have a category like on the page on the scene they can say great on deck and you can see it on computer too so like anytime you're shopping for any games they'll let you know like hey this one's gonna not be so great this one's not really set up or whatever. And it's just the integration is hard to beat. Okay. That makes sense.

I mean, like some of the things I heard about, like the Lenovo Legion being it's a Windows 11 device, like you don't get that instant on thing. Like it's probably not bad, right? Like you probably got a 10 second boot up if it's in sleep mode or whatever. But there are some positives to it, right? Like if you are somebody that signs up for the origin pay pay yearly thing you have access to all those games right so you're

not just stuck in the steam ecosystem you can actually jump between them right if you if you have an origin if you have an ea type thing if whatever it is you have that ability. So there's the positives to that. Then there's the negatives of it is windows. So it's got some, you know, it's not made for a little tiny screen like that, right? Like I'm sure they're making some compromises with that, but you know, I mean, I guess they all have their pros and cons. I did, I did hear a review. I think it was mobile tech review on YouTube. She was talking about like, you know, some people were like, hey, can you use this as like your to-go tablet or whatever? And she's like, eh, I wouldn't do that. But what she did say, and this is pretty interesting, if you wanted a gaming first device that you needed to sometimes get work done on, she said it's super easy to just plug up to a hub, right?

And you got a keyboard and a monitor hooked up to it. Now you can actually do some real stuff on it, right? Like whether you're taking notes or something like that. So it's, it's interesting, right? Like it's, it's sort of, they're trying to walk that fine line. So it's pretty cool. And I guess here's my thought on, on this other one, this Logitech is half the price of it's almost half the price of the lowest steam powered one so if if you are heavily invested in the microsoft world or you have one of the cloud subscriptions where you can play games that thing might be perfect right my guess is you'll probably get access to more, um, not childish games like Nintendo's

typically brings out, right? Like the cartoony type games, you'll probably get access to more AAA type titles that you get on Xbox and those types of things playing through the cloud without having to spend a fortune on the hardware to be able to run it. So it seems like that's actually a pretty good deal. Although that thing does have a 60 Hertz screen. So I don't know the FPSs and that kind of thing will be at the top of your list of what you'd be playing, but I don't know. All three of them are pretty interesting devices. What's up to 60 frames per second on the one Logitech. Yeah, that's pretty good. Right. And that's why it has a 60 Hertz screen. So it's like, I mean, for 300 bucks, that seems pretty good. I mean, that's,

it's got a better screen than what the switch does. And you'll probably have access to a better library of games. Probably is my guess. Well, I mean, I feel like the switch isn't, isn't really even compare though, because like you're automatically just lock in Nintendo.

Yeah. 100%. Yeah. So at any rate, that was my list and it was, you know, there was some developer stuff at the top and then the rest of it was about having fun and enjoying what you do.

So love it. All right. Well, with that, we head into mental blocks. I'm ready. All right. Are you?

Well, let's see. Let's find out. I don't know. So what is this 223 so uh alan according to techo's trademark rules of engagement you are first hey wait a minute didn't we have some new rules though that we were going to play by it was like you had to get the amount of wagers we're going to get the amount of points that we do so if we go after a one pointer we get one point if we go after a two pointer we get two oh and we were going to play the final round the final round uh in order to

okay yeah yeah yeah okay somebody somebody deleted my thing here hold on i gotta like add this back up because i can't be i can't be bothered to do math while we're doing this what are you talking about i was being sorry so there's that all right so alan you're up first your choices are your categories are psychology pop music all things irish g-ography where all responses will begin with a g four letter adjectives, not expletives and the museum of failure, man. Let's go pop music. Four points.

Ooh, I like it coming out strong for, oh geez. Yeah, man. The 2022 song Bam Bam features vocals by Ed Sheeran and this Cuban-American superstar. Oh, come on. I got nothing, man.

Nothing. You just killed the music. I got nothing. Joe, you want to take the steal? No. No? No, I just don't know. I got nothing. Joe, you want to take the steal? No. No? No, I just don't know. Who is it?

Why does it have to be a proper noun? Camila Cabello. Nailed it. I believe you. I think I got it right. What did you say? How did you say it? If it's two L's, it's a Y.

So Cabello. That's what I said. Rewind. Rewind the tape. You heard it. Camilla Cabello. Yeah. That's what I said.

Don't be good to me. I heard it. All right. Joe, your choices are Camila Cabello. That's what I said. Don't be good to me. Joe, your choices are famous American quotes, character slash actor, best sellers, what an animal, or

blank and blank, or real estates. Oh, Blank and blank or real estates? Geez. Let's go with what the animal for. Wait, I don't even get it. Three. Word. When an animal you said.

Yeah. The bottlenose species of this critter looks like it's smiling, but that's just the way its mouth is shaped. Come on, man. Oh, it's a bottlenose dolphin? Yes. I see him all the time. That's great.

That is correct. That is correct. So let me just note this for the record. That is ridiculous. That is so good. Okay. So, Alan, your choices are It Grows on Trees,

U.S. Government, A Sign of Shame, Understudy, World History, Oh, man. I'm sorry, Joe. Oh, no. The Golden State Warriors.

Let's do the Golden State Warriors for three, please. Okay. So some super champ with clues about her team. Okay. Which one did you say? Golden State Warriors. Yeah. But which level?

Three. Three. I'm sorry, Joe. In 2022, the way we're going to tie them. That's what, that's what he did.

That's what he did. In, in 2022, the Warriors captured their fourth NBA championship in eight years, besting this team that had Jason Tatum and the ghosts of past champions. Who are the Celtics? We would prefer Boston Celtics. Yeah, baby. All right.

So I feel like to make this fair though, Joe should get one more question and then then we do the final Jeopardy. Otherwise, then whoever starts off. Well, I mean, we're tied now. I don't know. We are tied, but you should get a chance to at least throw some extra points on the board before we do final. That's why you got to bet big.

That's why you got to bet big. Okay. That's right. Yeah. All right. So final mental blocks round. And the category is novels wait wait is this this is his or are we doing no this is the final one yeah yeah all right how do we wait you got it you got a wager so you're gonna i gave you the category so you gotta tell me your wager now

okay all of it all of it. All of it. Maybe I should just do two. I don't know. Okay. Nope. Too late. Yeah. Too late. So how do we buzz in? I forget how this works. No, you don't. We both get to, yeah, it doesn't matter if you, yeah, you either, you either get it right or you don't. Okay. I will put my answer down on cell 148. Okay. You're going to put yours on 248. Are you agreeing to that?

He's up there at 130. Get on down there. Joe, I don't think you're playing right, man. He's going to zoom out. He probably is. Look at the smile on his face. He's up to something. All right, you ready? Yeah.

Breeders, Wives, and Unwomen was the headline of the New York Times 1986 review of this novel. 1986? Yeah, that's correct. 1986. I'm trying to remember the name of it. Are you serious? Write it down in your cell. Yeah. Dang it man I'm totally blanking on it

I gotta know that I'm not even gonna write anything I watched it I'm done Okay I think I know it Just say it I'm done The hands made tail is it Oh god I cut a picture of you in the outfits Man I said I got the hands made tail is it. Oh, go on it.

Jeez. I cut like the picture in the outfits. Look, ah, man. So, uh, six to zero. Yeah.

I lost. No wins. Go big. Go home. Interesting. Yeah, that was different. Yeah,

that was fun. I didn't know it was that old. That's crazy. I didn't know it either. Yeah. I was kind of surprised when I saw that. All right. So for my turn, so I broke these up.

So you know how I like smart home kind of stuff. So I'm going to give you two in the same vein real quickly. Let me get into here and do a little copy paste. Bang, bang. So if you suffer from paranoia, like I suffer from paranoia, then this is the product for you.

so these are the Moen flow smart detectors and there you can get a leak sensing cable. That's basically like a cloth cable. And if the cable gets wet, then it'll, it'll sense it. But the idea being that if you have, if you wanted to put these like around, you know sinks or toilets or like you know water heaters or whatever like you can you can scatter these things throughout the house and you know it'll alert you if like there's if the humidity changes or the temperature changes or if it senses water right so like uh you know one great place for example, might be if your house is like mine and the pressure reducing valve is tucked away inside of a wall, right? How often do you go look in that thing?

Probably not very, but if you ever had a leak, you'd like to catch it before it got bad, right? So here I'm throwing up a link to the three pack you can buy them as a one one and done if you wanted to if you're interested in these things i would say just watch them because they go on crazy sales um the current price isn't crazy sale um so yeah just know that and a two-year battery life on it yeah yeah and and uh they're like normal they're they're they're like half the size of a double a kind of battery so point being is like it's not something that you're not going to find, you know, they're user replaceable batteries that you can find. All right.

Now this thing is, I love this thing. So I'm throwing that out there. This is the Schlage Encode Plus Wi-Fi deadbolt locks. So if you haven't already experienced one of these in your, especially, I don't, I can't speak to the Android ecosystem, but in the Apple ecosystem, oh man, especially if you are an Apple watch where you don't have to unlock your, your, your phone or your watch, you can just like literally just tap your device up to it and it'll unlock it. And you can do like all kinds of cool programming things to say like, Hey, if I leave the house, then, you know, lock my door. Oh, I don't know if that was part was clear. This is a smart lock for your door. Right? So basically you don't have to worry about carrying a key with you

because you're always going to have your phone or your watch with you. Right. And you can set up like a guest codes for somebody to punch in or like one-time use codes. And you can see like how often something was used or whatever. So like if you had maybe a cleaning service and, and you wanted to, you know, give them access or like, you know, a handyman needed to come by, you could give them a special code to get in. Um um and you could limit like how often it's used it's super cool uh big fan hey and for what it's worth it's actually rated pretty high on consumer reports yeah so yeah so i know somebody has this actually i love it that is my that is my uh very short list this year of smart things for the home, though. All right, tip of the week.

Okay, so here's my 50 pounds of chocolate, though, because I got to end on it. I didn't realize that it was 50 pounds, that you actually put a link. I thought that was a joke, and then I looked and noticed that you actually did put a link up there for that. Pure milk chocolate. So check this out uh joe's not going to care but alan four terabyte mvme to wait did i say that right mvme yeah four terabyte ssd it's amazing oh my yeah man i mean that's fantastic and for the price i mean seriously this thing is on sale right now 20 off for black friday 250 for a four terabyte uh mvme m.2 ssd you'll never need another one i say that right there's my bill gates quote right um 7 450 megabytes per second sequential read speeds like it's insane well the write speed

is impressive also it's 6 900 megabytes per second yeah Yeah. Like that's, that's insane. Yeah. Remember, do you remember when playing video games and the cut scenes were like the annoying parts of the game? Oh yeah. Not anymore. Yeah. Now it's there. Every time you're done, you're there. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's an absolutely killer product. And this is, I mean, I don't know that you called out what this is. This is the Samsung 990 pro.90 pro oh you're right this is the one that has like a higher um right duration and the ability to just take more like and i think they have a five-year warranty on them if i remember right like that's an extended warranty i forget what the warranty is let's see if it shows it in here anywhere. 50% improved performance per watt over the 980 Pro. It usually says years.

I don't see the warranty on here. Yeah, it does say five years. Oh, okay. Or other people say five years. But yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that you get when you buy the pros, you get that ability to write more and they have a much longer warranty on them. That's a killer device.

If you're building a gaming rig and you're not putting one of these in, why? Right. I mean, if you're building any rig and you're not putting this in, why? I know. Like you don't, you only need the one drive. Like seriously, like I mean, if you're building any rig and you're not putting this in, why? I know. Like, you only need the one drive.

Like, seriously, like, I have a two terabyte in now that I'm quite happy with. But if I were to rebuild this machine, I would absolutely go for that four terabyte. Dude, I might buy one anyways. I don't know what I'm going to do with it. Yeah, I don't know what I'll do with it but i'll make it i'll find a use for it hey i will tell you hey for people that that have playstation fives those drives are replaceable the nvme drives are replaceable this would be killer to put in there because i don't i mean i don't know how much you guys game on consoles anymore but it is so irritating i mean they make they make you buy the CD and you basically install the entire CD on the drive.

And then you also download another hundred gigabytes on top of that. So it's like, I mean, every game you put on there is taking up 50, 60 gigs. So you can't you can't have too much of this stuff now i will say though you probably want to make sure that uh any machine you're going to put this in can support pci4 pcie4 to get the full potential of it otherwise you know so i don't know like in your case well i bring it up because i don't know in the case of your uh playstation is that pcie4 it is oh it is yeah they they were like one of the first devices that came out with stupid high write speeds and read speeds i gotcha uh all right well then just talking about stupid um check this little guy out so if you want to free up some space in your, in your tower,

your CPU tower, or, you know, you're yeah, the box, like you want to clean it up, right? You want,

you want to clear up some space, this itty bitty little power supply. It is the picture. The picture doesn't do it justice. This is the C the picture doesn't do it justice this is the corsair sf series and it is compared to like a the the typical size power supply like maybe half the size of it oh that's awesome this thing is an 80 plus platinum certified 750 watt modular power supply. And it just it's it's great.

But here's the downside. So my son went this route for his computer. And what I didn't think about at the time that we got it is. It's great because it is so much smaller and frees up space but they also go with the assumption that all the cables are going to be short too that stinks yeah well but i mean it makes sense because if you're going to buy a small power supply like you know you're probably going to put it in a smaller machine yeah but i mean you can buy more you can so that's where this comes in well one thing to mention too the the

platinum is actually a big deal because that means it's 89 efficient at full load right so a lot of people don't think about this it cuts down on heat right which is a huge thing but then the other thing is it also lowered power bill a little bit too so you know oh this thing's like super ridiculously quiet too like um you remember the old school way of like if you wanted to test your fan your your cpu there was like you could jump two pins and you could see the fan spinning like okay the the power supply is working i think i said uh test your cpu a minute ago i meant to say power supply psu um but you could like you know jump two pins and then boom you could do that right and and like some of them

i think like evga they even came out with like you know they would include like the the test tool or whatever you can't do that on this the the power supplies now are so efficient that they will only spin the fan when they need to so there's right you know you you you don't have that ability to test them like you used to um but so i'm including the corsair premium individually sleeved cables that you could use if you needed the longer cables for like a you know a bigger build you know bigger system like especially if you got a system big enough to house uh water cooling and whatnot but um yeah these things look super slick in the case though uh now obviously like if you wanted to fully bling it out then there's like you can get the the ones that actually have like the led lights on the cables have you seen those no don't don't laugh at me those things are amazing

not laughing we know where your heart is with the the bling yeah man it's like yeah it's so great i didn't know i didn't know this existed this is crazy oh yeah they're they're like super uh i wasn't planning on holy smokes but yeah um i haven't seen these let me see here's i'm gonna throw this link out real quick and lee and lee seems to be one of the big ones that makes them. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty sick. So, I mean, you could get those for some of your main cables because I don't know that you're...

I've never seen a full set. And you probably wouldn't need it anyways. You probably only want certain ones, like maybe the one going to the GPU or the main one going to the motherboard things like that but yeah um they look super cool though uh okay so while we're on the category of bling let's talk about this oh wait let me just grab that so you know the the beautiful thing about where we the time that we live in now is like we just got talking about like bling for your cables like light up cables like yeah who would ever thought

like you know that that's where we were at right we are we are literally at the point where now you can bling you can get things that are, that are, you know, in the world of bling for your computer that you would have never even thought of. You're like, that doesn't, why? But okay,

well now I can't, I have it cause I can't live without it now that I've seen it. So, so this is in that, that vein. Have you seen the GPU graphics card braces that also light up? That's ridiculous, man. Oh, wow.

It's awesome. Is anybody else's Amazon pictures not loading fast? Like, if I try to mouse over them, I get nothing. Oh, that's because of me. I'm sorry. I'm, like, blasting the internet right now. Probably. Yeah, with all these great sales. Oh, that's really isn't it yeah and i'm gonna give you i now i have

now in full disclosure i don't have these these uh braces so i can't speak to like which one's better or not but so i the first one i included was one for called up here and it's basically a bar that's going to take three um spaces on on your expansion um cards because it's going to use three of those screws that you would use to hold an expansion card it's going to use three of those to hold this thing in and it's basically an arm that's going to extend out underneath your gpu and then hold it up but the bottom of it lights up and it's it's uh you know it's got like four over 1400 reviews and it just depending on what your build is it might fit in really nice with it you can get different colors of it you know so if you're if you're doing like you know my stormtro build, they have a white version. Uh, there's a, a, a black version

and then, uh, what were the other versions? Oh, white and black. And what was this one? What was the difference with that one then? I don't know. Um, but then there's the Cooler Master version. So instead of using the expansion slots to hold on to it, the Cooler Master version holds it from, it's basically like setting a footprint on the bottom of your case and then rising up to hold the GPU, which is what I have and similar to what I have in mine, only mine, what is that one it's a uh the gigabit it came with a support that goes from the bottom of your your tower to hold up you know

to and then lifts up yeah so this one looks like it almost looks like it's a piece of glass that that that just has this like random arm on it. But then the glass, you know, light is coming from the bottom and then wherever there's etchings on the glass glowing. Yeah. Yeah. So you kind of have this like floating light showing up in it and it's just super cool. And because it's clear to, you know, it's not going to block the views of anything else you might have done in your build. Right. Obviously, if you don't care about your build, you know, then, you know, and you don't have like a glass case to even see into it, then you're not going to care about any of this. You're right. Right.

But, you know, if you are like me and you're like well yeah i've got neon on my car um now now it's actually like just leds you know all over the place but um and then the last one that i that i included was another version similar to the up here and this one though like i don't know there's like knockoffs of, of so many things. So it's very similar to the up here version, except I wasn't sure what the name of the brand name is supposed to be, but maybe you don't care. But this is another one where it's going to take three of the expansion

slots to hold it up. And it's just going to be a bar that goes out underneath your, the only reason why I'm, I'm kind of, I kind of don't like the idea of those bar that goes out underneath your, um, the only reason why I'm, I'm kind of, I kind of don't like the idea of those two though, is that like, well, you're kind of like funneling the air,

you know, for, for the, the, the GPU, because the GPU fans are going to be on the bottom. Right. So you're kind of like funneling that air.

Am I, does that make sense? You know, I'm trying to say, maybe because they don't go all the way up to your gpu so there is technically like a a sliver of space you know that you know air could still be coming in but you're kind of like making this like uh i't know. You're restricting the air. Yeah.

You're kind of fun. Yeah. It's getting in the way a little bit. Yeah. And, and, and that cooler master one though was, unfortunately it was the more expensive one at $30.

The other ones were like, you know, 16, $18. But, um, you know, cooler masters,

a brand you've heard of the other two is like, I don't know. Um, and it was clear. So, you know, you're, brand you've heard of the other two like i don't know um and it was clear so you know you're you're not uh you know restricting the eyesight of your of your pretty build that you've done you know unless of course like Joe, I thought, you know what? Uh, health has been important, you know, that's the thing. So, uh, I wanted as a reminder, you know, do what Alan did. And as a reminder, I mentioned that, uh, hand massager that, um, from like a episode or two ago. I love that thing. So I just wanted to like throw that out as a reminder, but here's another idea.

Let's say you, that's the mega man sleeve, by the way, in case you forgot. right. Yeah. Yes. Mega man sleeve,

the life pro hand massager. It's, you know, $80 on Amazon. But if you, there's usually almost always a coupon that you can click on it and you know eighty dollars on amazon but if you there's usually almost always a coupon that you can click on it and you'll see that uh you know oh well now it's like sixty four dollars before right now and there's also a ten percent off uh coupon that you can get on top

of that so yeah it was it was eighty dollars when when I was putting this together. So if you've ever thought about like, you know, I would love the idea of working from a treadmill. Sounds like something that I might be interested in, but I'm not sure that I can commit to that, you know, or that I want to commit to that. I know like one year, Alan, you shared some, um, under desk treadmills as, as your shopping spree. I don't know if you ever got one of those, but if you ever wanted to like, um, you know, dabble in that game, right. And, and try it out. So I am in that category and I bought one of these earlier this year, and this is the, the Vivo universal treadmill desk riser that you, if you already have a treadmill, you can attach this to your treadmill. And, uh, so basically like, you know, how treadmills have like some arms for you to like hold onto and get started. Sometimes they'll have like a heart rate sensors or something like that

on it. So for $90, you can put this on top of those arms and you can raise it to whatever height you want it at and, and have a little desk at your treadmill that you already own. And, you know, at least see if an under desk treadmill is something that you would want to consider. Right. So, um, you do have to be aware of the width of your, your treadmill, like how the, the bars. So you will need to like,

you know, do math and check that. So, yeah, I don't know if there's like a standard width for, for those or not, but yeah, I actually,

I, I, I got this earlier this year and I was like super skeptical i was like i don't know and it turns out like i've loved it it's been awesome so uh then in that same kind of vain so last year i threw out um the stealth what was it called the stealth uh oh the stealth game thing you guys remember what i'm talking about no oh come on yeah you do you don't remember it was called bang look at my shopping spree from last year. And it was called the Stealth Abs Plank Core Trainer.

Right? And it's a super fun way to do planking. And, but it's, it's, so I'm not, I'm not going to repeat that one as like, you know, a tip from this or a shopping spree thing for this year. But I will say though, that like I got one, it's super fun to play. Um, it,

it makes planking worse because it actually makes it harder. So it disguises it as a game to try to make it better. But I swear that like, you know know just normal planking you'd be like yeah okay this isn't so bad but now you're like trying to rotate and twist and everything as you're like trying to you know uh fly a kite or something through rings and whatnot or uh you know there's like some they're kind of like um um, they remind me of like, so there's some Mario cart like game kind of things where it's like, you're trying to like roll through,

uh, you know, specific track and you're trying to catch different coins or whatever and, and whatever. Anyway, cool. Oh, in that,

in that vein of things, I throw this out there. Cause if you don't already have a yoga mat, then, you know, why not get a yoga mat and do some yoga right who hear yogas all of us every day right thought about it okay so uh yeah at any rate is that a good one though you like it yeah yeah i know this one um this one is called Balance From. It's a half-inch thick, high-density, extra-thick foam yoga mat. And you can roll it.

This is a thicker one because you can't get the thinner ones. But you can roll it up, and it has a built kind of carry handle with it when you roll it up and everything so yeah it's nice um keep it out of the way now this one you're gonna be like wait this is in your health category okay if you are not already in the front wallet game, let me talk to you because if you were still putting a wallet in your back pocket, like George Costanza and you're like sitting lopsided leaning to one side because you got too much stuff in that wallet and it's caught like that thing is horrible for your,

your spine, your back, like, you know, your posture is creating so many problems for you. You need to get in the front wall at game. And this is by far my favorite one that I've tried. I've had a dozen at least.

This is by far my favorite. This is called the Tightwad Money Clip by M Clip. And it is fantastic. It's a money clip, but it has a hole in it so that you can push through it to like eject the top card or to like, just kind of open it up to expand it, to put stuff in or out.

And it's only like $30. It's pretty good. It's the thinnest I have gotten yet in the front wallet game. Why have you had a dozen of these? Not of this specific one. I mean like different. I've tried different front wallet solutions over the years. And you've gone through 12, you think? Yeah, yeah. over the years right and you've gone through 12 you think yeah yeah because like in the beginning like i would uh like the the beginning ones that i had were all like uh like little leather pouchy

kind of things you know that like some of some of them wouldn't even fold open you know or whatever and and really it just got to be in the point where over time I would just iterate on like, why do I carry this around? And, and, and so I would just start whittling away at like what I'm carrying and where even with, um, in clip, the original in clip version I had, they have another more traditional money clip, except it's difference is that the, uh, well, I guess it's not more traditional, but they, they have this money clip where the sliders pull out to the, to open it. And it's super awesome, but it's, it's way more expensive. but the problem i had with that one is that you

if you start carrying too few cards in it then that more traditional one you end up having this like picture like a c clamping onto like just a small cards and so it can like pivot around and it just super annoyed me the tight wad because it's, it's more squared off the number of cards that it's holding onto. It kind of makes a better contact on every, on all of them. And so it doesn't like slip around and everything. And it's got like a, a better grip on it.

It feels like, but you know, you definitely need to iterate to where you're not carrying around a bunch of stuff because i think we're talking about like uh it says like oh you can carry up to 10 bills and five credit cards you know and that's if you that's if you carry cash on you which why are you still carrying cash so oh my god alan dude it disappears every day though like every time i go look in my wallet i'm like what what happened to it all right well here we're back on boomer hour well when you have kids in school believe me it disappears quick and jay-z it looked like he was about to say he

carries cash too no no well i mean i do but only because i got it out like five years ago i haven't spent it yet because where are you gonna what are you gonna do with it yeah arcades don't exist anymore where are we gonna spend it i mean there are legit stores that are card only now that tons of them now yeah you you can't even use cash in in the stores so like i mean it cuts down on theft like employee theft and stuff like there's a reason why a lot of stores are going to it yeah i don't know why you're bothering with that um it's like now you know now we're talking boomer hours that they don't even take your card anymore it's too complicated you go to the doctor's office and they're like oh no no i pull my car they're like no no no no do you have

a do you have a like a favorite source of brand that you want to talk about it too. I like fiber million. It's a source of fiber. That's so good. Oh man. I'm such a jerk. Let me tell you about my prunes. Okay. Okay.

Now, uh, this one, this one is definitely for you joe you're gonna you're gonna appreciate this one so um i wasn't sure like to even include this next set of categories in it but i was like all right whatever uh we'll see unless you guys like rebel but you know if you are like joe and i you know, you like to dabble in playing guitar, then this is a guitar cable, you know, your typical TRS cable on one end and a USB-C on the other end, right? So that you can connect your guitar directly into your computer or your iPad or your iPhone or, you know, whatever mobile device you have that has USB-C, right? And I looked, I did some checking on it. You had to be careful about like which cable you would provide. This one is called the Devin, why?

Devinol USB-C record cable. And that's the key is that there are a bunch of cables out there that you'll find that are TRS to USB-C that you can't actually do any kind of recording with, right? Which I'm like, well, why do you, why would you do that? Why, why even have the cable? This is $14 for the six foot. They make a three foot, you know, it'd be like $9 or something like that. I forget exactly, but I point that out. I throw that out there because this goes along, that goes along with this. This is by far, oops, that really blew up that cell, but, um, there's this company called Peterson, Peterson toers that make probably the best tuner for any instrument that you've ever seen.

And this has been their entire business for decades, right? I stumbled across this cause I was, I stumbled across them cause I was watching a video from one of Eddie Van Halen's guitar techs, and he was talking about how he would set up Eddie Van Halen's guitars for him. And he was using this software version that I didn't realize at the time, but it's called Strobosoft, made by by Peterson and he was using it on an iPad. And the thing that noticed that caught my eyes, like I had noticed that in other, um, I watched way too many like music videos on, on YouTube or like, you know, live concerts or behind the scenes footage of concerts or like,

you know, their, their rigs, like, you know, uh, you know, slashes rig or, you know, whatever. Yeah. Um, and when I noticed those, I was like, Hey, I've seen that software on that iPad used at, on other iPads and other videos before, like I recognized it and the, the, the idea you can, you can get this software for your, for your phone and, uh, for your iPhone and iPad, it's $10 on the app store and you buy it once works on both. You can use it with this cable. And the, the idea that peterson had they've been like i said they started with tuning um uh pipe organs so they've been doing this for decades and um they have like you know the the bench style that like a a luthier might use to when they're working on guitars or whatever. Um, but their ideas behind how their tuners work is that like a lot of the guitar tuners that you'll see today, it might have

like, or especially the ones that are built into like amplifiers, it'll have like, here's five LEDs. And you know, if you get into the middle LED, you're in tune. But if you're on one of the other sides, then you're either sharp or flat. Right. And they're like, yeah, in, in our tuner that we just sold you with these five LEDs is super accurate, accurate. And we measure it to this scent, scent, right? Cause, cause they measure tuners accuracies in sense, which is, you know is going to be one thousandth of a point. You're going to need a thousand LEDs

to truly show every possible place on that spectrum that you could be. So if you only have five and you're in the middle one, well, that's a lot of swing on either side that you could technically be not actually in tune. Right. And so the way Peterson said is like, well, the human eye is really good at perceiving motion. So instead of just showing you a limited number of lights, we're just going to show you motion. And when you see that the motion stops and you're in tune, but if you see it scrolling to the right then you'll know

you know that you're uh which one is right that you're that you're sharp if you see it rolling to the left then you know that you're flat but that's all you need to care about and depending on what how big the screen is you might see multiple bands uh of these like streaming these uh rolling blocks you know um at any rate if you're into music at all and or like you know any kind of string instrument you can use this software for that string instrument and specifically you know i'm throwing in this cable that you would be interested in and it'd be a great way to like get into using the peterson tuners they have like hardware versions that you can get for like a pedal board or whatever if you wanted to or a clip-on tuner if you wanted um so ten dollars

for the mobile version of it the desktop version depending on which one you want can be anywhere from $50 to a hundred dollars because they have, you know, two different versions, but, um, super cool piece of software. Uh,

I'm in love with that company. Their, their stuff is so awesome. And the, their tuners, if you do get the, any of the hardware based tuners, they have these things called sweeteners.

So depending on like, um, what kind of tuning you're going to do, like it's going to be a 12 string, any of the hardware based tuners, they have these things called sweeteners. So depending on like, um, what kind of tuning you're going to do, like it's going to be a 12 string or it's an acoustic versus an electric, you can actually like tell, tell the, the tuner, the piece of hardware, like, Hey, this is the thing I'm going to tune. And it will try to take into account the differences of that type of device or, or there's more strings or oh you're gonna go uh you're gonna play with a capo or you're gonna drop you know to like drop d or something like that it'll try to take it can try to take all that in consideration so there's like a you know 200 different sweeteners that they call them something like that where's the usb coming

plug plug into into your device. Your iPad. Okay, I see. I see. Yeah. Okay, the iPad. Yeah. Or your phone.

So like you're on the go, right? Then you could just plug it straight in and it's a super accurate tuner that you can use. So if you buy the app once, you can get on your phone and get on your iPad, you install anywhere? Yep. Pretty great. Okay. Yep. you buy the app once you can get on your phone and get on your ipad you install anywhere yep pretty great okay yep um and i believe the software version is mac specific too if i recall um so just know that um i'll go through some other like guitar related ones quick just to like throw that out there but um these have been some of my favorite guitar finds i'll just throw all that out there so one of them that threw out there was the uh the i think it was this earlier this year dunlop introduced the um special edition of the crybaby

junior which was a um a version that was specifically made to better fit pedal boards because the traditional cry baby was too big for pedal boards. So they introduced the cry baby junior and, the special edition white one looked super cool because then it has like the red, uh, logos and foot pad on it. But the super thing that I like better,

I, even though I like the sound of my kirk hammett uh wah better the one thing that it doesn't have that this one does have is a stupid led to tell you when you've turned it on or not and i don't know why the the kirk hammett one doesn't do or any of the other signature series for that matter. Like, I don't know why they don't, what all of them should include a stupid light to tell you, like you've engaged it or not.

And instead you're like, well, did I press it? And you start playing, you know, whatever you want with the wall and you're like, Oh, it's not doing it.

Yeah. So this is on carpet. It's can be really hard to like, get it, get it pushed down. Yeah. I, the problem is is and the reason

why i ended up getting this i think i've like worn mine to the point where like my kirk my kirk hammett one it's like super sticky like you like to try to uh engage it like you if you don't have it up loud and if you don't have your sound up loud enough you'll hear it creaking because it's like the pedal doesn't like really have smooth smooth movement anymore and apparently like that's just a thing that happens on you know cry babies so cry about it um also if you have have a Floyd Rose or similar type bridge, then I threw in the hex hider Allen wrench, which is a must have to be able to like, you know, loosen the nut, retune when you need to, and then tighten it back up. I'm not sure you'd want to use it for anything else, but it just, it'll attach to the tuners behind the headstock. And then it's always there and you, you never are without it. Um, I was doing some build, you know, wanted to build a new

pedal board and a couple of years back now, temple audio came out with their, uh, series of pedal boards. They come in different sizes. I included the duo 24, um, and in my favorite color gun metal. But the thing that I liked best about the temple audio pattern was it's super modular. So like the sides of it, they make all sorts of different, um, adapters that you can like, um, if you wanted to have XLR XLR connections on it, you can, if you wanted to have XLR connections on it, you can, if you wanted to have, you know, your normal quarter inch, uh, TRS jacks on the side of it, then you can, you can have an input for that. You can have a power adapter into it, whatever. There's super well thought out, like in terms of the modularity of it from the, the different things they offer for the sides.

But then from the top of it, it's, it's just got a bunch of holes to like route your cables in and to mount your pedals they have these like quick releases so that you can attach a quick release to the bottom of your pedal and then you can screw that on rather than like the alternative where people use uh like uh forget what the velcro is called but it's like a very high strength kind of plasticky velcro that like super grips you know what i'm talking about joe i don't know yeah i don't know what it's called though i didn't know it's a name but the cat hair still gets in there so yeah so you don't have to worry about that with this it's much cleaner and it's not it's not going to like wear out over time and then um if you haven't gotten the shaler strap locks

i threw that out there too because like i was super hesitant about this and looking back on it i'm like i don't know why i was because now i can't i can't imagine life without them because they're so much better. The only downside, though, is that you have to be careful about installing them, and you're going to want to make sure that the hole is ready for it beforehand. I don't know about you, Joe but like i will take a a drill bit and i will not put it in a in a drill or any kind of like mechanic you know machinery i'll just hand roll it into the hole just to kind of like enlarge the hole before putting this in because

the point is is that the strap lock uh button from from the the shaler is going to use is the screw is actually bigger um so you you want to make sure that you do you do that make that hole bigger so that you don't like crack the wood or anything like that but other than that mine's always been comparable to the screws that were in there it's interesting hmm really yeah that has not been my case i've never had to do any drawing um oh well one time i had one that was too loose and i had to put toothpicks in it yeah that see that freaks me out yeah you you had to do that for one of the shalers yeah it was the instrument i had was i don't know if it was a loose knob or what it was only one of them so i assume that you

know either factory defect or something or maybe i just rocked too hard or something i don't know that's probably it you rock too hard yeah okay so then uh quickly finishing up here so um if you are into cycling and mountain biking specifically well technically road bikes could do this too but this is more common i guess in mountain biking but to go tubeless on your um your bike are you are you tubeless currently, Joe? Nope. You went back to tubes? I never went tubeless. Oh, really? Yep. Too lazy. Oh. Well, if you do decide to go tubeless.

So Stanz is pretty much like the more common industry, well-known kind of brand out there. But a few years back, I switched this company called muck off. And the cool thing about their tire sealant is that it will show up. If you ever have a leak, it will show up under a black light. So you can, that's cool. So here's a little black light like,

Oh yeah, that, that muck off. I included like the little one and done kind of thing that you could like put in your pack. That's like $10. You know, you can buy the bigger jug if you're doing a brand new wheel build, but you know, here's a, here's a blacklight for $13. And you, you might think that like, Hey, that's crazy. But earlier this year. so one of the things that I got into was wheel building. So building my own wheels for my bike.

And after doing a new build, I had put enough fluid, you know, enough of the tubeless sealant in there and went for a ride. And then like then like uh i don't know a few days later the tire was like super soft like it lost much air and i'm like what what and sure enough i pulled it up on a black light and could see that like it wasn't getting the right you know i could i could tell exactly where the problem was and in my case case, it, it, I didn't have as good a bead on the wheel on the rim as I thought that I had. And so you can see some coming out, uh, are in certain areas. And all I needed to do is just like really pump it up more to like, kind of put, expand it out and got it in there. But yeah. Um, so I, I've been a big fan of that stuff.

Um, your mind may vary, but also to speaking of, uh, my last two here. So, you know, the quick releases on your,

um, on your wheels, Joe. Yeah. You still have those. Yep. Oh oh you're so 90s hi what else is there i have gotten out of this so um there's a bunch of different ones that you can get right like this is by no means uh so i i included the one from wolf uh for i included the one for like the new rock shock suspension for the front,

but they make them for the front and the rear. You got to pay attention to, you know, what your, what fork you have on the front and your, your hub width on the, for the rear. It doesn't have to be Wolf,

you know, other companies make them SRAM makes them for example. But I wanted to do this was because I wanted to – I noticed that there were a couple times where I would accidentally bump the quick release, and I might loosen it or not, or I could over-tight tighten it without meaning to and instead by switching to the axle where you don't have that you can just specifically torque it down to a specific uh you know newton meters amount and be done with it and you know that you're not like squeezing anything in the hub, you know, like the bearings or whatnot. And, you know, you know, you have, it's not too loose. It's not too tight. You know, it's the Goldilocks, right? And if you want, they include a link to,

they have a multi-tool handle that you could use where you're like, well, yeah, that sounds great outlaw. But what happens if you get out on the trail and you get a flat and now you got to do a repair right you there's a tool that you can use to do those kind of repairs um you know instead of having that quick release and again i just didn't want to have the quick release to like accidentally bump it or um you know over over tighten it or, um, you know, over, over tighten it or something. So that's why I prefer to just have it torqued down to a specific amount. And that's my dumb list. I mean, my shopping list. That's a good list.

That's a good list. All right. Well, we've gone a little bit, so I'm just going to hurry up and, uh, tell you that we're going to have links in the show notes, but also hop on down to the tip of the week. So, Alan, you were talking about some pretty cool audio stuff earlier. Have you ever looked into synthesizers? A long time ago. Yeah, well, they're super cool now.

The deal with a synthesizer is, you know, talking about audio specifically, is that you make sounds with it, right? So you can make a sine wave, square triangle wave blend two together you can change the shape to kind of alternate between them bring out the different harmonics and kind of do all sorts of fun stuff and really learn a lot about um sound in general and how it works uh as both like sound waves like in the atmosphere in the the oxygen, and also just how it works for computers and stuff. And they're really cool how they work, and it's a whole big subject than just the different kinds of synthesizers are. There's frequency modulation where you use like one wave to change another. There's wave tables that's kind of gotten into where you basically can kind of

have different like lookup tables or different functions you can use to kind of figure out how to modify waves. And you can blend those things together. You have modular synthesizers. So you can kind of take an oscillator, which kind of moves between values and run it through another oscillator. And then have the frequency modulated and then plug it into some sort of effect. And then loop it all back again. So it kind of makes a crazy uh sound and um you know like i'm sure you've seen those pictures of like old like synthesizers in the 60s and 70s with like big they look like

switchboards where people like kind of plug one thing into another that's literally that's a modular synthesizer you're literally changing the routing and that's the kind of stuff that you can do with the synthesizers uh virtually and they're super cool and uh they're not user-friendly at all i mean it's as hard as like i mean think about the old school ones you know they just had a bunch of dials you know and like didn't have a lot of areas to even like write what the name of the thing was you know so like there's a lot of abbreviations and stuff and there's like lfos and lf1 pm1s like all pulse modulation all sorts of stuff um pwms like just all these acronyms and you just have to know and even once you know what they are like

knowing what they do to the sound is a whole other story and then it changes of course based on you know how you got set up and stuff uh so it's just really dense however it's gotten a lot easier in the last like two or three years because in part, this company Vital, or the synthesizer's name Vital, I think it's the company too. But they put out a 100%-ish tiny asterisk on it. We'll get there. Nearly 99% free, fully functional wavetable synth. It's semi-modular, so it's got some routing options and stuff you can do. It's got this really cool text-to-wavetable feature,

and that's the part that's not 100% free. It's like a cloud service. So you can type a sentence, and it'll generate the waves based on how a human would say it, and you can use that to influence your sound. So it can kind of make it sound like your synthesizer is like saying a word or a phrase or whatever which is just kind of cool um but that's the that's the part where uh you don't get that 100 for free because it's

actually making you know web service calls whatever uh but other than that everything is free uh and it's just really cool it's a really cool way to learn about uh synthesizers there's a lot of really great youtube content that's kind of taking the whole like synthesizer community by storm because it is so free and uh comparatively uh easier to get into compared to older uh synthesizers in particular it's got a focus on ui so it'll actually show like how values are changing you know like if you hook up like an oscillator or an lfo a low frequency oscillator to kind of move you know values uh a lot of times like in older synthesizers you couldn't really tell what was moving there was no there weren't really good graphs and even if

there were like having it mean something to a human you know just a bunch of numbers changing or line squiggling uh was really tough but vitals taken really, really big swing at making it more user-friendly to get into, which is really nice. And so, yeah, there's this, this synthesizer and the pro version, the one that gives you everything is 80 bucks,

right? And what does it give you? It gives you that text to wave table stuff that I mentioned, unloaded access to that. Also, it gives you a ton of presets. Dude, it's just 80 bucks. It's not even 80 bucks a month.

It's just 80 bucks. Just 80 bucks. Yeah. And here's what, so there's a couple of really cool things about it. So presets are actually super huge in the synthesizer community. It's because synthesizers,

in a way that like they're kind of already solved you know it's like if you look at like the compatibilities between like all the major flagic products from all the different synthesizer manufacturers on paper they're all pretty similar how they differentiate each other are the user interface and also the presets so for a long time now it's already been the case where you get the synthesizer for kind of cheaper and the presets cost money because these things are still really hard to set up. And it's really a lot of stuff to learn and get into and to actually make something that's like fun to listen to is a whole nother story. So these companies have been differentiating their products based on

presets. So the deal is this synthesizer is basically know basically free but if you want synthesizers you can either buy these packs you pay the 80 but what's cool about it is they have a rent to own program where you can pay five bucks a month subscription and it that money gets credited to your account so and it's 100 money so month one you got five bucks month two ten blah blah you pay for for whatever 80 divided by five is. And there you go. You can buy the full product with that credited amount. So it's literally like a zero interest rent to own program.

And I've started seeing this pop up in a few other places. There's a few other synthesizers that do this. And I think that's a really cool way of like kind of lowering the barrier and entry. Saying, look, you don't want to pop down. You know, this one's $80, but there are other ones that are hundreds of dollars. It's like, you know, you don't want to pop down. You know, this one's $80, but there are other ones that are hundreds of dollars. It's like, you know, you don't want to pop down a hundreds of dollars. Let's just give me five or 10 per month. And then when you got enough money there, you're done.

So I thought it was cool. Yeah. It's called vital. Let's try it. That's very excellent. It's funny. I actually have a synthesizer and I've looked at the envelopes and stuff on it before and i was just like i got no there's no way it's so i mean it's like the learning curve

is a brick wall like a thousand feet high it's just you have you can't learn any of it unless you learn a lot of it uh which is unfortunate but uh it made it easier i wanted to mention to that um so this is a vst i forget what stands for, but basically means it's a plug-in that'll work in any digital audio workstation. So GarageBand, for example, Reaper is a cheaper alternative. They're open source versions. It'll work great in all of those. This also has a standalone

version, which is not as common, which means you can download this on Windows or Mac, and I don't know about Linux. It does. Word. And you can. It does. Yeah. Word. And you can just start poking. Sorry.

You can get like a $30, $20 or something like that MIDI controller keyboard, just like a little USB keyboard that's got no sounds on it. Hook it up to your computer and just start playing right now. Or you can play with your actual computer keyboard. It's a little awkward, but a great way to get started. And, I mean, it is super cool. There's a lot of stuff you can do with sequences and stuff. So it's like you kind of hold down one button and then you've kind of like done this stuff you've you've set up all the automation and stuff and like i say automation i mean this is

like it feels like programming you're gonna do a lot of routing you're gonna do a lot of like even abstractions and stuff setting up like fx chains and different chains and kind of paths and stuff it definitely feels like uh kind of working on a distributed application, you know? So when's the next album drop? Because you're not doing this just to do it. You're putting this on tracks. Oh yeah.

Yeah. I'll spend like a thousand hours and drop like two bad tracks out of it. But it's coming. It's in the works. That's amazing. Yeah. Super cool. All right. My mind is not nearly as good. Da's in the works. That's amazing. Yeah, super cool. All right.

Mine is not nearly as cool. It's a daft Joe. Yeah. Even more than usual. So, this, actually, one of the guys we work with had said something, like, just out loud. He was thinking one day. And he was like, oh, yeah, I need to send myself a reminder. And he started to do something in Slack and he was like oh yeah i need to send myself a reminder and and he

started to do something in slack i was like what and and so he he's like i was like dude what are you talking about so this isn't exactly how he did it but slack actually has like uh if you do giphy right it's like slash giphy and then you do whatever. They have a command for setting yourself a reminder as well. You could do slash remind for the shortcuts and then you can tell who you want to remind, whether it's yourself or the channel. Then you say what it is and then when with like a date format and a time. So if you didn't know that, this is kind of cool. I didn't know it existed.

I always, it's amazing. I always, I, okay. I shouldn't be surprised that there's a slash command for this, but I always just right clicked on it and would do the remind that way. Yeah.

I, I'd never even thought about it. Right. Like anytime there was something that's like, Oh man, I need to remember that. I'll like flag it or, you know, tag thought about it. Right. Like anytime there was something that's like, Oh man, I need to remember that. I'll like flag it or, you know, tag it or whatever it is. And then I have to remember to go back and look at it.

Whereas this is, it will actually notify you when, when you need to go back and look at something. That's just fantastic. But if I remember right though, what he was talking about was sending himself messages. He would send himself a message and then i think he would he would like flag that message or something yeah so well he was uh we might be talking about two different conversations then because the conversation i was thinking of the person said that he'd send himself he would send himself messages

as like where he kept notes to him for like things it wasn't that was another reminders it was like oh here's this cool command or whatever yeah that was another thing i didn't know about like you could search for yourself right like go to click and add a new message and then type yourself in you could you can send yourself a message just like you could send yourself an email or something. And I'd never even thought about that either. It's, it's also another super useful thing. So, yeah. Well, um, in the vein of like, oh yeah, I guess I forgot about that or didn't know. Um, so sometimes when you want to like log a message out to like, you know, whatever your favorite logging platform is,

and you'll want to do like a log dot debug, and then you'll have this like interpolated string, blah, blah, blah, blah. What I ran into was there was this case in, in the,

our code where I saw that we were saying like, Hey, if logging dotdebug enabled, and then it would do the logging statement after. And I'm like, what intern wrote this? Like, why would you bother to do that? That's the whole purpose of the debug message. And I went tracing through the source code

from the logging package i'm like why would you do this and what was pointed out to me and i felt silly for like not thinking about this before and i'm like yep that makes total sense sometimes taking the hit for doing that string interpolation is too high a cost and that has to happen before it gets into the logging message or method to decide whether or not logging debug messages is enabled or not so you might take the hit to to interpolate that string only to find out like do nothing yeah and so don't even call the method. So, you know, in highly performant code, maybe it's worth, even though it's seems overly verbose,

it might be worth doing a check, you know, to see like if logging dot debug enabled before you try to do a log dot debug. Yeah. The debug stuff tends to be in kind of tight loops anyway. So it kind of tends to be in areas that you call the last then alan didn't am i wrong did you not do this uh tip i don't know

that i shared it on this show i think i shared it in our in our work group oh no i'm curious did you yeah i don't think it's on the show oh you should that was a great tip yeah hey i was the one who showed me that i didn't know until fairly recently yeah it's funny i saw i saw your message the other day i was like oh man because i saw it after somebody had already replied and i was like yep yep because it does look ridiculous right you're like wait a second why are you putting an f around this like that's really dumb and then when somebody's like oh yeah it's really expensive you're like wait a second why are you putting an f around this like that's really dumb and then when somebody's like oh yeah it's really expensive you're like oh oh yeah and the thing was like i was super confident so i'm like i'm removing this and and you're gonna have to convince me that i'm wrong because i'm like this seems silly right because i threw the question

out there i was like hey you know unless people object i'm just gonna go ahead and remove it because this this seems unnecessary and so i like went ahead and deleted that out and went on about my day and then i got schooled and it was like oh yeah you're right and had to undo it and i'm'm like, yeah, totally makes sense. So, yeah, that's Shopping Blocks. And subscribe. Whatever. Later. Leave a review. It's the holiday season. Leave a good review. Thanks for listening. Yeah, what's the lesson we've learned? Anything greater than season. Leave a good review. Thanks for listening.

What's the lesson we've learned? Anything greater than three stars is okay. Wait, is it greater than or equal to three stars, Joe? Equal to. It's the holidays, though. Do you really want to be so... Maybe say like one. Greater than or equal to one?

Yeah. I'm getting out of here for Alan. This was.